


Sequelae

by The Spike (spike21)



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Adrift, Angst, John Sheppard Whump, Love, Post Episode: s02e08 Conversion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-29
Updated: 2008-02-29
Packaged: 2020-09-28 10:03:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20424143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spike21/pseuds/The%20Spike
Summary: The weird thing was, when the knock came at his front door, he knew it would be John.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Story idea from Sarah T.
> 
> Spoilers for episodes "Conversion" & "Adrift" – goes AU from the beginning of S4

After the hearings, Rodney took his slap on the wrist, his pay cut and his demotion and went to work for Radek Zelenka at Area 51.

He still hated the desert (too hot), the lab (too big), the staff (too impossibly young and stupid) but it was a dull kind of hate, listless and without heat. Mostly he just felt tired. Tired and heavy, as if Earth’s gravity had increased minutely while he’d been away. (It hadn’t; he’d checked.)

The only thing that evoked any feeling in him at all was the work. Their department had been given the bulk of the Atlantis materials to keep working on – the puddlejumpers, the four years of accumulated science reports, the tech that had previously been sent back to Earth for study, the few pieces of unidentified tech they’d rescued at the last minute and the small chunk of the Ancient database they’d managed to transfer to the Apollo before they’d left.

Radek ran the department with what seemed to Rodney to be a lot of polite but insistent herd-riding – prioritizing the projects already in progress (mostly to do with building or recharging ZPMs and all doomed to failure) and thankfully, leaving Rodney alone to pursue whatever he wished.

What he wished was to be back on Atlantis with a working ZPM and a time machine so he could get back the ten goddamned minutes he’d needed to save Elizabeth’s life.

But since none of those options were currently on the table, the only bearable alternative was revisiting the notes he’d made while inhumanly brilliant (even for him.)

The most accessible of these was the application of hyperdrive technology to the puddlejumpers and so that became his work.

His life, really. He couldn’t stomach the idea of living on base, so he leased a newish two-bedroom ranch-style house on two acres of cactus and scrub sage outside Alamo, Nevada and an enormous Volvo four-by-four and commuted the 40 miles to the base and back along Highway 93.

The house had come completely furnished – everything from dishes to furniture -- and the only personal touch Rodney added was a satellite dish that had 739 channels and a 72 inch plasma TV that loomed like some sleek, black insectile robot over the beige and pastel floral blandness of the living room.

Not that there was ever anything good on.

Rodney usually ended up turning the sound down low and dozing fitfully until his back and bladder insisted he get up, pee, and go to bed. At least when he was tired enough, he didn’t dream.

The only socializing he did was the enforced kind – monthly calls from Jeannie, work receptions, retirement parties, eventually Christmas parties at the lab. He never really intended to go, but since he was usually still at work when they started, he’d wander over to peer critically at the hors d’ouevres, make himself a plate, and take it back to the lab with him.

At first people attempted to chat with him, people whose names he didn’t know and didn’t care to try to remember, but Rodney, while he usually had plenty to say about their latest project or whatever physics news had come down the pike, found himself disinclined to share his opinions with these shallow idiots. What would be the point? Either they understood the way things worked or they didn’t and if they didn’t, they certainly weren’t likely to listen to him about it. Eventually they stopped bothering him and it became an easy task to slip in, load up on snacks and slip out again without having to even pretend to play nice.

Radek was the only person he still called a friend. Not that he had much more to say to Radek, but at least Radek knew what it was like to see a city fly, a solar system explode – at least they shared the same bizarre frame of reference. There was a comfort in that – in not having to explain himself or even say much of anything. And Radek’s ideas were not ridiculous. Not particularly brilliant either, but that was comforting too. And Radek did not seem… dissatisfied with having been returned to Earth. Rodney wasn’t sure why that was important to him, since he himself was anything but, but just knowing that Radek wasn’t simmering with resentment was a strange kind of relief.

Not that it had been his fault, of course, but still…

They played chess from time to time, took dinner breaks together at the lab, argued about physics, went for the occasional beer. When Radek began dating a woman, a translator from somewhere in Eastern Europe, contracted to Area 51 to work on the Ancient database, Rodney assumed that would be the end of that too, but he was wrong.

Edita was a friendly, trim, darkly pretty woman around Radek’s age, and unselfconsciously half a head taller than him. Her presence in Radek’s life seemed to increase his sociability not diminish it. In fact Radek claimed that it was Edita who insisted Rodney come to the house once a month for a real meal -- as if he were still the skinny grad student who’d once evoked the mothering impulses of any number of professors and/or their spouses.

And like with those benefactors, Rodney went for the food and ducked the attempts at conversation. He had nothing to talk about but his work, past and present, and that was both classified and nearly impossible to explain.

And so it went from year to year. Rodney found a hook into the unbelievably complex physics of applying the hyperdrive technology to the puddlejumpers and focused more and more on that project alone. Radek turned out to be a pretty good second on the project, when he wasn’t trying to electrocute Rodney, and together they made slow, patchy but tantalizingly promising progress.

Time moved inexorably forward. Radek and Edita married. The SGC fought off the incursion of the Ori and then the Igsithera and then some non-Pegasus human-form replicators designed by a desperate civilian with a sick sister. Rodney heard in passing about various Atlantis personnel.

Chuck was apparently working long-range sensor array technology for the Air Force; Jennifer Keller had been named head of Medical right there at Area 51, Kate Heightmeyer was teaching at Harvard School of Medicine, Katie Brown had gotten attached to a gate team through the SGC and was gaining a reputation for magnificent botanical finds in unlikely places. Nothing about Sheppard though. Never Sheppard.

Not that Rodney particularly cared to know. John had chosen to walk. To burn his bridges. _To martyr himself_ a vicious little voice whispered in Rodney’s heart. Because only John Sheppard had the right to be angry. Only John Sheppard was allowed to be _right_.

And even thinking about Sheppard, as his intractable brain would do from time to time, brought everything back as if no time at all had passed. It made him angry and miserable by turns, and left him so exhausted he sometimes just stayed in bed, not even bothering to call in sick. Radek seemed to understand, which was more than Rodney could say for himself, but he was grateful not to have to explain and tried to make up for it by working harder and snapping less when he returned.

It didn’t happen that often, although Rodney couldn’t understand why it didn’t happen any less often as time went on. Time was supposed to give some perspective to old hurts and resentments, at least that’s what he’d been told, but this pain never seemed to lose its freshness.

Still, October tended to be a good month for him, promising the end of the September’s unholy heat (temperatures under 100 degrees for days at a time!) and the occasional balm of a cloudy day. On clear nights he could almost imagine he saw Pegasus with his naked eyes if he stared hard enough at the spot. Could imagine himself in a puddlejumper, sighting on the galaxy like a sailor on a familiar star, jumping through the blue- jeweled smear of a hyperspace window to the last outpost of the gate bridge, down through the tunnel of rings and well, ‘straight on ‘til morning’ was in keeping with the far fetched fantasy.

Very far-fetched. Even when they had seemingly broken through the first major hurdle of the hyperdrive puddlejumper hybrid, the SGC refused to even entertain the thought of reopening Pegasus without Atlantis as a base. If they’d softened their position on that, Rodney hadn’t heard.

Still, October was a good month and Rodney could occasionally feel the stirring of hope, which is why, when the growl of a huge engine dopplered to silence in his driveway and the knock came at his front door, he knew with uncanny certainty, that it would be Sheppard.

It didn’t matter that nearly five years had passed without a word, that there was no reason for it ever to be Sheppard, but even so it wasn’t so much prescience, perhaps, as his brain’s instinctive grab for the worst possible case scenario. Who did he least want to ever see again, oh yes, John Sheppard and opening his door he just _knew_.

Not that it in any way prepared him. He opened his mouth, but no words came from his brain to fill it. As though the shocking disconnect from memory to reality had frozen all his gears.

John was somehow a lot bigger than Rodney remembered him. Solider. He was tanned, deeply scruffy, leather-jacketed, wearing his goddamn aviator shades. Standing there, hands in pockets like some kind of…

Anger thawed him.

“What do you want?” he asked, sounding high and tight to his own ears. John just smiled, the big fake ‘fuck you’ smile Rodney had gotten to know so well.

“Hey, Rodney,” he said. “Good to see you too.”

“Yes, yes, bitterness, recriminations, unpleasantness,” Rodney said. “All witty banter and oblique insults aside, the question still stands. What do you want?” Better. That was better. Stronger. He had his own ‘fuck you’ in case Sheppard had forgotten. He waited for the smile to turn brittle, for John to turn and walk away again. Again. Again. It didn’t happen. Instead John slumped a little, dropped his head, took a breath, like this was hard for him.

Well, good, Rodney thought. This should be hard. In fact, it was going to be impossible, there was no way he was apologizing this time. Been there, done that, got the right hook to the mouth… and John still hadn’t moved. Sweat trickled down Rodney’s back. It was only late morning but October or not, his body already knew the day would be unbearably hot. Even inside the refrigerator quality air conditioning in the bowels of the base he sweated. It didn’t improve his disposition, as Radek never seemed to tire of reminding him. And speaking of whom…

“Well,” he said. “As uncomfortable and unpleasant as this has been, I have to get going.” He took a step back inside the house and John’s head shot up.

“Rodney…” he said. It sounded hoarse and rough and awful and it stopped him. Made him look for things he didn’t want to see. John’s lips were dry, chapped. His stubble was as silver as it was dark. He looked… weary.

“You’re dying,” Rodney blurted.

More worst case thinking, he knew, but it gave him another cold shock. He recognized the feeling now, the thing that had been skirling up like movie monster fog at the fact of John Sheppard on his front steps. That implacable terror that he’d only known in nightmares before he went to the Pegasus Galaxy. Terror with a rage chaser. And there it was. He was suddenly beyond furious, into something cold and sickening. John opened his mouth. Rodney held up his hand.

“Don’t,” he said, swallowing hard. “You don’t get to come back for that.”

And there was John’s brilliant, bitter smile. Almost a relief.

“Good thing I’m not here for the tea and sympathy, then,” he said. The smile turned off like a light switch flicking “I’m not dying, Rodney.”

“Then what,” Rodney said, not waiting for the relief to wash through him. “And why exactly do I care?”

“Not out here,” John said.

“Then not at all,” Rodney crossed his arms firmly over his chest.

“Stubborn son of a…” John muttered. “Look…” He glanced left and right, disturbingly shifty, and then leaned in and used one finger to push his shades down on his nose. Rodney followed the motion, puzzled, waiting for John to start whispering code words or something, but John just stood there waiting until Rodney looked up, questioning.

He wouldn’t have thought he could feel more scared than he had just seconds before but it turned out he was wrong about that too.

“Oh,” he said, a little numbly.

“Oh,” John echoed.

It was the left eye. Green-gold and flat and slit-pupilled like a cat. Or a big, mutant bug. John pushed the shades back up, hiding it. There was no other sign, no blue-gray scales, no talons, no sharp, musty smell that had made Rodney’s skin crawl. Not that he was close enough to smell anything of John now. Not that he wanted to be, but still. He wasn’t an idiot.

“Fuck,” he said. “All right. Come inside.” He stood back and held his breath as John edged past him into the house.

Inside, John walked through the living room and stood with his back to Rodney, staring out the window overlooking the enormous, empty backyard. Rodney watched him from the doorway that led from the foyer, still hugging his arms to his chest, frantically wondering if he could just leave, just grab his laptop and briefcase from the table by the door and head to the lab. John would certainly be gone by the time he got back. And if he wasn’t...

“Nice place,” John said, turning around.

“It’s fine,” Rodney answered, distractedly. “Have you… seen a doctor or anything?” He could see the silent shake of shoulders that was John’s imitation of a laugh.

“No,” John said, vaguely mocking. “I thought that would be a bad idea.”

“Well I don’t know what you think I can do for you,” Rodney snapped. “You should be talking to the SGC. I’m pretty sure they have protocols for--

“No,” John barked, making Rodney jump. His hands had fisted inside his pockets and the tension fairly twanged across his shoulders. “No,” he said, more quietly. He still had the shades on. Rodney couldn’t help looking for other signs, on the v of his neck, the exposed crescents of his wrists.

He couldn’t see anything, but there was very little, he realized, in the way of exposed skin showing. Under the leather and denim and facial hair John could be all blue scales and thorny bristles. Rodney shuddered a little at the thought. Alien. John had been so …alien.

“If they can help…” Rodney said and John shook his head, tightlipped and hard.

“They’ll lock me up,” he said. It sounded ragged, but then John was moving across the floor, too fast and too angry. “That all right with you, Rodney? Did I make a mistake coming here?” He crowded close, not touching, but Rodney was backed up against the doorframe as surely as if John had pinned him there.

“That’s not a fair—“ Rodney said. They were both panting a little. Rodney felt the sweat pool and run down his face, his neck, soaking his shirt.

“No,” John said and suddenly he was standing down, frowning and turning his face away. Rodney felt like he could breathe again, but only carefully, through his mouth. John was still too much in his personal space even if the intensity was dialed down.

“I know,” John said. “Listen, Rodney, I just want to go... I just want to go back.”

“Oh,” Rodney said, ignoring the naked longing in John’s voice. “You just want to go back.”

“I _need_ to go back, Rodney. I’m not safe to be around here. At least in Pegasus I can… I can do some good. Kill some Wraith. Maybe even find Ronon or Teyla. They’d know how to handle things.”

The sound of those names actually hurt. Rodney could feel it in his chest – an ache like an incipient aneurism ready to give. He had a sudden image of John coming through the gate to a circle of waiting arms, hearty backslaps, forehead melds. He had to swallow against the pain.

“Oh, you _need_ to,” he echoed. “Well then…” He snapped his fingers, looked around with exaggerated concern. “Hmm. Didn’t work. Sorry. Out of miracles.”

John sighed, rubbed at his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Look—“

“No, _you_ look,” Rodney cut him off. “You think you’re the only one who left things -- important things -- behind in Pegasus? Guess what? You’re not. Some of us, _some_ of us, didn’t just walk away. We swallowed our pride and stayed and picked up the pieces and begged for the chance to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Do you know how long that took? Do you know how much crow we had to eat in order to—well no, obviously you _don’t_ know. You couldn’t know because you. Weren’t. There.”

“Feel better?” John asked, after a moment.

“You’d think I would, wouldn’t you?” Rodney said, half to himself. “I’ve been waiting to say that to you for, well, years.”

“It sounded pretty honed,” John said. Rodney shook his head.

“What you’re asking…” he said.

“You think I don’t know that?” John said. “I know what I’m asking. But I don’t exactly have a lot of options here. I can’t -- _fuck_ \-- I can’t let them lock me up. That leaves me with two choices. I was kind of hoping to avoid the one where I head out into the desert and blow my head off while I’m still lucid enough to remember how.” John paused, took a shaky-sounding breath. Ran a hand through his hair. “As for Pegasus… I was thinking maybe you owe me.”

“Oh, that’s low,” Rodney said, fury making his own voice shake. “I’d say even for you, but well, even for you.”

John shrugged.

“I guess we still agree to disagree on that point.”

“Sure,” Rodney said. “Whatever. Regardless, I can’t send you back to Pegasus. Not ‘won’t’. Can’t. There’s no way back. No gate, no extra ZPM, no available Asgard ships…. Pegasus is closed, for some pretty compelling reasons I vaguely recall – or did you forget all that when you were dreaming up this lighthearted caper?”

“You know, I had actually forgotten what an asshole you are,” John said, with a snide tilt of his chin. “Thanks for setting me straight.”

“Oh ha ha,” Rodney said. But John was at the front door already, hand gripping the door handle. “Wait…” And fuck, could he not resist for one tiny second? Could he not just keep his mouth shut, let John walk away and take his guilt and his accusations and his huge, unbearable problem out of Rodney’s goddamn life?

Apparently, the answer was still ‘not so much’.

“Wait,” he said again, even though John hadn’t moved. Even though he had nothing. Except… He snapped his fingers as things started to click into place.

“Wait. You know you don’t actually have to go back to Pegasus,” he said. “You just need a cure, right? You just need to stop turning into a, a, a bug. And then you can go back to the… the Hell’s Angels or whatever it is you’re into these days. That’s another option, right?” He didn’t know why he was holding his breath, but when John slowly nodded he felt like he’d just come up from being under water for too long.

“Yeah,” John said, turning slowly back toward Rodney. “I guess that could be an option. If you knew a way to do that.”

“Well,” Rodney said, rubbing his hands together. He still felt a little sick inside, but he was definitely on firmer ground. “I may not be the head of the Science Department any more, but I still have some contacts. I still know some people. I’ll, uh…” John was still standing with his hand on the door handle and it was making Rodney nervous. “Why don’t you sit down? I have a dish,” he pointed to the big TV, the remote. “Seven hundred and thirty eight channels, not that I have much of a chance to… uh, and there’s Coke in the fridge if you want…”

John didn’t look at him as he came back into the living room and slouched down on Rodney’s beige leathercouch, so Rodney couldn’t really explain the dizzying rush that pulsed hot and sticky behind his eyes. Still, he waited until John was flipping intently through the channels before he grabbed his phone and started making calls.

Two hours later, Rodney had Jennifer Keller on the phone.

“Rodney?” she said. “Rodney McKay from the Atlantis project?” She sounded more than surprised. He supposed it made sense. He’d always thought of her as someone he knew reasonably well, but he hadn’t actually spoken to her in a very long time. Calling her suddenly felt risky.

“Atlantis project, yes,” he said. “And I know it’s been a long time but I have a small, uh, crisis of sorts. Not really an emergency, but possibly requiring your kind of expertise and, uh, discretion.”

John hadn’t moved from the couch, nor taken off his jacket or sunglasses, nor spoken three words to him in the last two hours, but Rodney could tell he was listening.

“My schedule is pretty full these days,” Keller was saying. “I could fit you in at the base clinic on Thursday at the earliest. If it’s more urgent than that you’d have to come in to our ER.”

“Actually,” Rodney said. “I had more of a house call in mind. It’s, uh, of a personal nature.”

“Okay…” she said slowly.

“What about tonight?”

“I don’t mean to be rude,” she said. “But this isn’t some kind of awkward come on, is it? Because I’m really not—“

“No!” Rodney said, colouring. “No. It’s a medical… issue. Look, if it’s too much trouble...”

“No, no,” Keller said, sounding genuinely rueful. “Sorry, Rodney. You just took me by surprise. It’s been years since I even thought about Atlantis. But yes, I can make some time for you tonight.” Still embarrassed, Rodney managed to give her directions to his home.

When he hung up, John was watching him.

“She’ll come tonight,” Rodney said. “In the meantime, I have work to do.”

“Sure,” said John. He was on his feet.

“Where are you going?” Rodney said.

“I’ve got a few things to do myself,” John answered. He opened the door and Rodney grabbed his briefcase and followed him out into the hellish afternoon. There in the packed gravel driveway, just in front of the house, was an enormous motorcycle. It was dusty from the road and obviously well used, but under the dirt it looked space-age and new, all heavy, black-and-chrome curves and dangerous leather.

“Typical,” Rodney said. “Is that from the Rogue Pilot Cliché Catalogue?”

“Just living the dream, Rodney,” John said. He tugged open a saddle bag and pulled out a bag of tools.

“Well, try not to break anything,” Rodney said. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

Rodney made his way across the drive to the garage and punched the tiny remote in his pocket. The garage door rose slowly and the Volvo beeped and thrummed to life.

He got in, the air conditioning already bringing musty but cool air in and backed carefully out into the driveway.

John waved him off without looking up and Rodney sped off along the gravel, knowing he was overcompensating with his foot on the pedal and not caring all that much.

For the first time in ages, work turned out not to be a balm. He was tense and edgy – enough so that Radek, who tended to simply ignore his worst moods, actually interrupted him in the middle of trying to tell some googly-eyed young lab monkey exactly why it was a bad idea to cross-wire pod-nozzle venting feeds with anything with the words ‘internal atmosphere’ on them.

Radek herded him gently up the stairs and into Rodney’s private office overlooking the lab floor. He made Rodney sit down and brought him some water. Rodney drank thirstily, wondering when his mouth had gotten so dry, and why he hadn’t noticed that his heart was hammering. He was still angry, of course, but Radek didn’t admonish him or even ask him to explain what had happened. He simply rested his hip on Rodney’s desk and looked concerned.

“Better?” he asked after Rodney’s breathing had eased and he’d wiped the sweat off his face.

“I’m fine,” Rodney croaked.

“Oh I can see that,” Radek said, dryly. “But perhaps this is a day to be fine at home, yes?” Rodney was inclined to argue on the grounds that Radek was not actually his mother, but the truth was he was terribly anxious about what John was up to in his absence and his concentration was shot and he really _didn’t_ feel all that great.

“Will you at least explain to Dr. Kandinsky—“

“Kandlemann,” Radek corrected.

“Whoever,” Rodney said. “Could you please explain that mistakes in this field cost lives?”

“Of course,” Radek said. “As long as you refrain from taking them yourself.”

“Yes, yes,” Rodney said. “No killing the lab monkeys. I’ve got it.”

“Good,” said Radek, squeezing his shoulder. “I’ll make sure Kandelmann is clear on his wiring protocols and you, go home and get some rest, okay?”

Rodney returned to the house to find John sitting on a blanket by his bike, reading a large hard-cover book. He waved lazily as Rodney drove past him into the garage but didn’t get up. When Rodney opened the door of the house, he looked up.

“Are you coming in?” Rodney asked. John appeared to consider this for a moment before he nodded. He closed the book and folded the blanket, tucking both under his arm as he approached the house.

Inside, John returned to the couch and TV in the living room. Rodney pulled out his laptop and began to work at the kitchen island, self-consciously at first and then eventually losing himself enough to forget the looming presence in his living room for moments at a time. In his peripheral vision John flicked restlessly from channel to channel, settling occasionally on some sports thing or another.

Meanwhile, the air-conditioner roared softly in the background and the hot blue afternoon faded to twilight in silence outside the windows. When the doorbell shrilled they both startled and looked at each other.

“I’ll get it,” Rodney said, even though John didn’t make a move to get up.

Jennifer Keller had cut her hair. It surprised Rodney because he was sure he’d seen her around the base looking not too different from when she’d stood beside him during the IOA hearings. But the woman at the door had short, no-nonsense hair and fine lines beside her eyes and if he thought about it he had to admit they hadn’t exactly become buddies.

“Dr. Keller,” he said, ushering her into the foyer. He caught a turpentine-y whiff of desert wind. “Jennifer. It’s good to uh…”

“Yeah,” she said looking him up and down. “You too.” He hesitated for a moment, still embarrassed by their earlier conversation and unsure of what to say. Keller took pity on him and smiled, awkwardly.

“So what’s this emergency?” She asked. She had a small rolling-type suitcase with her and Rodney wondered if that was her doctor bag. He was trying to decide how to tell her when he heard the squeak of leather on leather behind him, saw her gaze flick over his shoulder.

“Colonel Sheppard?” she asked, her voice full of wonder, as if John were some mythic figure she’d never seen bruised and cranky on her infirmary table. She left her bag at the door, walking toward the couch with her hand out. It hit Rodney all over again what a shock it was to have John here. Too weird. Too much. Two people in his house felt like an invasion, like there wasn’t going to be enough air.

“Just ‘John,’” John said getting to his feet and taking her hand, squeezing it gently, Rodney noted. “I’m not in the Air Force any more.” It sounded so neutral when he said it to her, like he’d never blamed anyone at all for that. Rodney rolled his eyes.

“He’s turning into a bug again,” Rodney said. They both turned to him, then back to each other.

“Yeah,” John said, lightly, putting on a rueful grin. “I guess I should have kept up with those booster shots.”

“Were there really…?” Keller began but John shook his head. His laid back pleasantness grated hard on Rodney’s nerves. He took a step toward them.

“So, if we’re all caught up now,” he said. “Maybe you could just get on with the curing.” Keller looked startled.

“I’ll have to examine you before I make any treatment decisions,” Keller said to John. “I’d prefer to do it in my lab.”

“Yeah, no,” John said, sounding regretful. “The SGC and I didn’t break up on the best of terms.”

“If you need to be contained…”

“No,” John’s voice was low and raw again. If Keller noticed, she didn’t let on.

“I was on Atlantis the first time around, you know,” she said. “I was trauma, not epidemiology, so I wasn’t on your case but I dealt with the casualties.”

“Oh for heaven’s sakes,” Rodney said. “He broke a window and knocked out a few marines. Ronon did that three times a week before breakfast. “If it comes to that I have a garage where we can chain him up. ”

Rodney felt a flush of mean pleasure at John’s sudden flicker of discomfort. He went on, warming to it. “You wouldn’t mind that, right? In the spirit of cooperation?”

Keller still wasn’t looking at him, her eyes on John, who looked away from both of them and shrugged.

“It would be better if it didn’t get to that point,” he said.

“Which is all the more reason for us to bypass the weeks of endless paperwork at the SGC,” Rodney added. Keller looked thoughtful.

“This is far outside my field of expertise,” Keller said, glancing at Rodney before turning her gaze back to John. “I’m not sure I can help you, even if I agree to.”

“Well, of course you’ll agree to,” Rodney said. It blindsided him. “You were… I mean, you’re… You have to.”

“No, what I _have_ to do is report you to the SGC,” she said. “The protocol for alien infection is pretty clear. If I’m caught…”

“If you were caught,” John cut in, smoothly. “You’d probably say I threatened you.” Keller nodded slowly.

“I’d have to get hold of Dr. Beckett’s notes,” she said. “And the serum itself, or at least the necessary components.”

“Without leaving a trail,” John said. They both looked at Rodney.

“Yes, yes,” Rodney said. “I’ll do the heavy hacking. Can we…?”

“After I examine my patient,” Keller said. If Rodney hadn’t been staring right at John he would have missed the flinch.

“Right now?” John asked.

“Seems like a good time for it,” Keller said, the tiny crescents at the corners of her mouth on the verge of lifting. “Since I brought my bag and all.” John didn’t manage an answering smirk. Instead he seemed to steel himself before he nodded.

“Okay.”

“We just need a little privacy,” Keller said, looking once again at John. It took Rodney a minute to realize it was a question directed at him.

“You can use the guest room,” he said, grudgingly, pointing them to a room partway down the hall. He didn’t add: it’s not like I haven’t seen it all before in the field, because, well, that wasn’t even true any more. He didn’t know what else John might be hiding under all those clothes. Middle age spread, maybe, or nipple rings and flaming skull tattoos. It could be anything.

Keller ushered Sheppard into the room before her and closed the door firmly in Rodney’s face.

Rodney stood there for a moment, hearing their voices muffled through the hollow door.

This, he thought, was a very bad idea. John was like a stranger now. He _was_ a stranger.

Alien.

Rodney remembered smashed glass, the bruises around Elizabeth’s neck, all the rumours of super-speed and super strength. His garage wasn’t _that_ secure. He’d need chains, handcuffs, manacles. A stunner. Maybe one of those guns Animal Control used to shoot tranquilizer darts into predatory mountain lions. A taser...

What exactly had he been thinking when he agreed to any of this? It wasn’t like John had turned on the charm for him. Not the way he had with Keller. That had been weirdly painful to watch – restarting the ache just behind his breastbone. Which was probably gas. Like that knot in his guts was probably hunger.

He’d wandered into the living room and picked up the remote, but instead of flipping to the news as he meant to do, he turned the TV off and stood there listening to the sudden silence. Listening hard. Trying to determine if he was imagining the shuffles, clinks and muted thumps from behind the closed guest room door.

By the time he’d inched close enough to tell that yes, that low rumble was John’s voice and that _was_ the sound of glass clinking, he was also too close for any kind of plausible deniability when the door suddenly opened. Keller emerged with her little bag in tow and quietly shut the door behind her. She gave him an assessing look but didn’t comment. Rodney swallowed the terrible need to babble his excuses and went for the offense instead.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well,” Keller said. “I have some tests to run and some reading to do. Assuming you can get the notes.”

“Oh, I’ll get them,” Rodney said. “They’ll be in your in box before you get home.”

“Good,” she said, and then paused.

“What…?” Rodney said, alarmed again. “He’s not all…” He flailed a little with his hands, trying to and failing think of a more tactful phrase than ‘disgustingly buggy’. Something about Keller always made him self-conscious about things like that. Maybe it was the way she never hesitated to call bullshit. She seemed to know what he meant though and gave him an assessing look, which annoyed him.

“Look, I think this trumps doctor-patient confidentiality,” Rodney snapped. “He’s in my house. I’d like to know if he’s going to—“ he flailed again, “--in the middle of the night and kill me in my sleep.”

“How would I know?” Keller said. “You’re the one who volunteered to keep him locked in your basement.”

“Garage,” Rodney said. “And it’s possible I hadn’t worked out all the, the mechanics of the practical—“ Keller waited, but really, he had nothing. He hadn’t actually thought about it at all beyond not getting the SGC involved. Finally, she relented.

“He seems as well as can be expected,” she shrugged. “The skin changes are obviously uncomfortable; his vision is affected by the increase in light sensitivity of the altered eye; his metabolism is in flux, blood pressure’s up…” She paused again.

“Didn’t it make him feel good last time?” Rodney asked. “Better, stronger, faster?”

“He’s not turning bionic, Rodney,” Keller said and Rodney rolled his eyes. “And, as I said, I need to run some tests.”

“What about mentally?” he asked.

“Mentally, he seems… fine,” she said, slowly. “A little depressed maybe, understandable under the circumstances, but no signs of psychosis, paranoia, dementia…”

“Yet,” Rodney said. He didn’t get the rebuke he was expecting. Something about the way Keller was looking past him to the closed door made him think there was more she wasn’t saying.

“And..?” he prompted.

“Nothing,” she said, hesitantly. “I think he’s cold.”

“Believe me,” Rodney said, grimacing. “You saw his good side.”

“I meant _physically_ cold, Rodney,” she said. “It’s freezing in here.”

“Oh, forgive me for keeping my house at a temperature I find bearable,” Rodney said, defensive even though he knew it was true. The air conditioner ran at max 24/7. His electric bills were outrageous. But he couldn’t stand the Nevada heat.

Keller shook her head and walked to the front door. She stopped there, hand on the handle, and turned back to him, a slight frown on her face that might have been disapproval.

“What?” he asked, casting his gaze around with the inane thought that maybe he’d left a copy of _Hustler_ on the guest room night table or something – inane mostly because he hadn’t owned a copy of_Hustler_ since he was 14. And even if he had, what right did she have..? His thoughts trailed off and he brought his gaze back to her face. The assessing look was there again, that slightly worried expression that she’d worn through all the hearings. Then, to his surprise, her expression eased.

“I’m glad you two have settled your differences,” she said, laying a small, cool hand on his arm. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, bird light against his skin, or of the strange compulsion he felt to wrap himself around it, never let her take it back. The touch unsettled him enough that he barely even had time to process her words, let alone form some kind of coherent denial. And then it was too late anyway, she had the door open, letting the night air in and was stepping away from him.

“I’ll get back to you as soon as I have something,” Keller called over her shoulder, and maybe it _was_ too cold in here because the loss of warmth where her hand had been was enough to make Rodney shiver.  
  
The house was quiet and too new to be creaky. Rodney’s stomach whined an interrogative. He supposed he could ask if Sheppard was hungry. Now that he was free to, though, he felt reluctant to approach the closed door of the guest room. Maybe Sheppard was sleeping in there. Maybe he wasn’t. Either way, Rodney doubted he wanted company. Rodney certainly didn’t.

Instead he headed for the kitchen where he nuked himself a frozen chicken dinner from the undiminished stack of identical blue boxes in the freezer and ate it while slowly hacking his way through the SGC’s reassuringly and annoyingly impressive security. A good deal of the hacking was of the ‘create a crack and let it run’ variety so at the same time as he was breaking in through the back door, he logged on legitimately though the ultra secure server in order see what an unsupervised Zelenka had wrought in his absence.

Mostly what he’d wrought turned out to be email detailing approximately one million nitpicky little tweaks and twiddles, each of which Rodney had to vet or argue with or save them from. Working with Radek was a little like working with a nervous grandmother with obsessive compulsive disorder, although he had to admit that the kind of crazed attention to detail that Radek brought to the table could be useful at times. When it wasn’t holding them back.

He was so involved with his work that the sound of the guest room door opening gave him a serious start. He was grateful to hear footsteps pad along the hall and then the muffled sound of water running. By the time Sheppard came into the kitchen he’d managed to get his heart rate under control.

Sheppard looked tired and a little cranky, standing awkwardly in the kitchen doorway in just a pullover and jeans. He wasn’t wearing his sunglasses and the gold-green of his alien eye seemed almost backlit. It gave him a strange distracted appearance. Like Ford had looked after his change, caught halfway between two unreadable expressions. Disturbing. Rodney realized he was staring and his eyes darted around the kitchen, coming helplessly to rest on John again.

“Did you, uh… sleep?” he asked. John shrugged. Then grimaced.

“Look,” he said. “I just… “ He shook his head, annoyed. “I should get a motel room.”

“Right,” Rodney said. “Because they’re so well equipped to deal with…” he gestured at John’s impending bugness.

“I told you, I’m not—“

“There yet,” Rodney said. “Yes. I heard. But personally I’d rather not run the risk of some cleaning lady gossiping about the biker in 21B who leaves a ring of blue scales in the bathtub. It’s not like your people don’t pick up on that kind of thing.”

“My people…” John said it slowly, like the very concept was unknown to him.

“The military.”

Even behind the shades, John’s shock at his words was evident. Rodney felt a pang of discomfort. He almost apologized, but John spoke first.

“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?” John said.

“Oh yeah,” Rodney said. “It’s been my dream to have you show up mutating and homicidal on my doorstep, and put the one good thing…” He couldn’t actually bear to finish the sentence. John wasn’t really listening to him anyway. He knew that frozen, pleasant expression -- although it didn’t usually look so patently false. “Look, it’ll be a few days, tops. You’ll be cured, I’ll still be employed, Keller can add an exciting new disease experience to her life list and we can all go on with our lives.”

John seemed to consider for a moment, then he nodded.

“Fine,” he said. “I have a bedroll on my bike. I’ll sleep in the garage.”

“My car is in the garage,” Rodney said automatically. The garage was the only thing that kept the Volvo from being a 6000 lb rolling oven when he got into it after the sun had risen. “You can, uh, stay in the guest room.”

John shook his head.

“The guest room’s not secure,” he said.

“You said you’re not there yet.”

“Never know when I’ll turn, though,” John said, with a small, vicious smirk. “The garage or I go.”

“Suit yourself,” Rodney said. If John wanted to sleep out there with the scorpions and lizards and god knows what else rather than share air with him, then Rodney wasn’t going to stop him. John’s desire to be as far away from him as possible had been made clear enough five years ago. Had become more than mutual in the meantime, so Rodney wasn’t entirely sure why it still bothered him.

He went outside, opened the garage door and backed the car out onto the gravel. It was going to be hell in there tomorrow. After a moment’s consideration, he disabled the remote mechanism. Then he closed the garage door by hand – no easy task -- and engaged the ground-lock Then he went back inside.

In the kitchen, he rummaged angrily through his surprisingly full junk drawers for the spare garage key while John went out to get his things. It wasn’t as if he had invited Sheppard to show up on his – aha! There it was. – doorstep. The inside door to the garage was just off the kitchen, although Rodney never used it, in case opening the door were to let in any of the horrifying desert pests– spiders, snakes, scorpions -- sure to be lurking inside.

He fiddled with the stiff lock until it caught and the door opened, then gingerly felt the dusty wall until he found the light switch and flicked it on.

As a place to sleep, the garage was decidedly unappealing – unfinished walls with naked wooden framing and roof exposed, plywood roof, the single light bulb hanging from the rafters cast a greenish light on the brown-painted cement floor. There was a drain in the middle of the floor, dust and cobwebs on every surface. Boxes that Rodney had never unpacked were piled against one wall, an unused lawnmower and gardening tools that had come with the house lined the back wall. There were 6 small rectangular windows in the garage door. A hose hung on a hook nailed into the one uncluttered wall and there was a water spout about six inches off the ground just underneath it. All modern conveniences. The room smelled of dust and gasoline. It was already colder than the air-conditioned house and cooling fast in the desert night.

He heard John’s footsteps behind him.

“There you go,” Rodney said.

“Thanks,” John said, as he moved past him, careful not to touch. John dumped his bedroll on the floor along with an insulated blanket and a battered black leather pouch that looked like it had come off the bike itself. Rodney found himself watching John crouch to unpack. It was… strange having John right there. Right _there_.

All the imaginary conversations he’d had where he’d told John exactly what he thought of him; all the scenarios he’d imagined where John had come to him begging for forgiveness or help. He thought this had even been one of them, but he couldn’t actually remember how it had gone. He was pretty sure he’d felt better about it all in his imagination. That John had been much less… John-like, he guessed.

This studied (or worse, maybe not even studied) ignoring of him, those quick efficient movements laying out his kit, that stubborn refusal to make any of it anything but as hard as possible for Rodney – this was definitely John. Bug, or no bug, he didn’t know anybody better in the world for that.

He left without saying goodnight, and after a moment’s debate, locked the door behind him. Then he went back to the kitchen and checked his hacks. Still chewing their way through the firewalls and making steady progress. He nuked himself another chicken dinner and ate it while he fiddled with the problems Zelenka had sent him. God they were close. If Sheppard only knew how close. Well, once they’d gotten off the ground, Rodney would be sure to tell him.

He worked on the specs until his crack program beeped at him that he was in. It took only a few minutes of rifling through the database to find Carson’s old notes, which he gathered up with barely a pang, and had the dummy account send to Keller’s inbox.

Then he threw the remnants of his dinner in the garbage, turned out the lights and went to bed.

Rodney woke after a surprisingly restful sleep. There was no sign of John having broken through the garage door in a mutant rage. He did listen at the garage door while he nuked breakfast but didn’t even hear snoring. After another, slightly longer, internal debate he unlocked the garage door but didn’t open it.

Outside, the day was already baking in the late morning sun. The huge, dusty, black=and-chrome monstrosity still sat gleaming in the gravel of his driveway absorbing heat. Rodney walked around it once on the way to his own car. It was the kind of bike that made people stop and stare but not linger to meet the owner. The medallion said Harley Davidson but Rodney had never seen the model before. It looked vaguely Wraith-y in design, and that was disturbing all by itself. Already drenched in the late morning heat, Rodney got into his pale blue Volvo oven and headed to Area 51.

As was usual, Radek made no mention of the previous day’s unfortunate incident, choosing instead to let him settle in while peppering him intermittently with conversational salvos: The last simulation had some troubling numbers, had Rodney seen them? And somebody named Jared had gone and recalculated massing vectors in exactly the way it should not have been done. And there was tuna surprise on the lunch menu for the third day in a row, and had Rodney found any solution for the wobble in the gravitational field inducers?

He didn’t remember Radek being so chatty when they were on Atlantis – but maybe he himself had been more involved in the little details of day to day.

Or perhaps his concentration was not as keen as it usually was. The day passed ridiculously slowly. His mind kept darting back to John – to what he might be doing, thinking, turning into... To Keller and her tests. He debated emailing her to see how things were going, furtively composing short, cryptic notes from various dummy accounts and then deleting them unsent. He even considered phoning the house, knowing that John wouldn’t pick up, his hand straying to the cell in his breast pocket, over and over again.

He caught Radek watching him speculatively -- each time meeting the gently concerned gaze with a scowl and dismissive head shake as though he’d only looked up in the process of puzzling out a problem and not because he could feel himself being watched.

He thought, briefly, about actually telling Radek what was going on so that he would stop watching him – Radek after all had never fallen out with John, had in fact managed to stay in his good graces, even during the hearings, perhaps even after, before John had dropped off the grid entirely.

But really, there was no need for Radek to know. He didn’t need to put _his_ position at risk. And, closer to the truth, the idea of having yet another person tell him how glad they were that he and John had made up just because they were being relatively civil toward one another made him feel uncomfortable.

Or perhaps he was getting sick. Ordinary anxiety couldn’t derail him like this, could it? Not just the distraction of whatever was waiting at home, but the strange blurts of memory he couldn’t stop from coming: Elizabeth’s conspiratorial smile the first time the 8th chevron had locked; the arch of John’s eyebrow when Rodney asked him to help test the personal shield; Lieutenant Ford’s steadying hand on his shoulder in some woods somewhere. Teyla’s face as he handed her a scalding cup of tea; Ronon’s real laugh; Carson’s jostling elbow against his own. Stupid moments. Meaningless moments that no one would ever remember now but him, and what difference did any of it make?

Maybe it was the work itself. Things weren’t immediate here in the way they had been on Atlantis. Everything had seemed important then -- every breath, every choice. He supposed danger did that, made it all seem so very significant. Whereas the reality was that it didn’t matter much what you did, or said, or ate, or who you loved. Choice like that was an illusion.

The reality was that things just happened – people came and went, people died or lived, people were right or wrong, but no matter how smart you were you could never predict the outcome of any decision. However smart you were, the universe was just that much smarter and it really didn’t care whether you were alive or dead or a bug or a replicator or here, or gone…

He realized to his horror that he was near tears.

“Rodney…?” Radek’s voice was soft, careful, in that way it often was when Rodney least wanted his attention. He opened his mouth to tell Radek to fuck off and let him work but found that he was close to choking on the rising tide of feelings and waved Radek off angrily instead.

If Radek hesitated, Rodney pretended not to notice and continued to ignore him until he was gone.

The day was clearly shot, though. The more he tried to engage with the work, the more his mind wandered over territory he had no wish to revisit. In the end it was all he could do to contain his anxiety as he packed up the laptop, and slipped out of the lab.

The drive back through the Nevada wasteland was filled with Rodney’s slowly rising dread. He wasn’t even sure what he feared might have happened, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something had.

But when he arrived home, John’s bike was still there, albeit in a slightly different spot in the gravel. Inside, John was still there as well, sunglasses in place but instead of jeans and biker chic, now he was dressed in used looking sweats and a dark, hooded sweatshirt. The TV was on, but John wasn’t watching. Instead he was lying on the living room floor doing sit ups – something Rodney could not remember ever having seen John do. He looked like he’d been doing them for a long time but almost as soon as Rodney closed the door he leapt to his feet.

“Hey,” he said, overly loudly – the way people did when they were listening to loud music but had forgotten they had earphones in. John wasn’t wearing earphones though.

“Hey,” Rodney replied, uneasily. “You’re… in the house.”

“Yeah,” John said. He was panting a little, his hands twitching at his sides like they wanted to curl into fists. He shrugged unapologetically. “Restless,” he said, like it explained everything.

“Right,” Rodney said, remembering John, yellow eyed and wordless, sprinting away from them into the cave full of bugs. He’d smelled sharp then, sharp and sour like vinegar, the scent lingering in Rodney’s nose while they watched the clock run down on his humanity. Rodney took a cautious sniff but he couldn’t smell anything except the slightly freezer burnt smell of the air conditioned air.

“Any news?” John asked, hopping up to sit balanced on the arm of the sofa, both heels pressed against the pale leather.

“News?” Rodney echoed.

“From Keller?”

“Oh, right. Right,” Rodney said. “No. No news.” Something about the perched, waiting quality of John’s posture made Rodney’s shoulders hunch.

“Look, is everything… okay?” he asked. John raised an eyebrow. “Well obviously not ‘okay’ okay but—“ He broke off when John stood suddenly, moving towards him fast. Rodney stepped back, reflexively clutching his laptop case against his chest, but John just brushed past him into the hall.

”I’m taking a shower,” John said brightly over his shoulder. “Wouldn’t want to leave a ring in the tub.” The door slammed behind him and the sound of water started up.

“Ha ha,” Rodney said to the empty room. Then he stomped over to the kitchen and tossed the laptop case on the island, irritated. It wasn’t like he’d been planning on washing the sweat and dust off after a hard day’s work or anything. He plugged in the charger and booted up the machine. The door to the garage was open. Rodney walked over and stuck his head in.

He was surprised to find the bedroll still spread open on the floor. John’s personal stuff spread out in a little crescent around the pack. John was usually pretty tidy, but who knew this new version of Sheppard. Maybe he was rebelling against all those years of hospital corners. Rodney would be nice though and warn John about scorpions. He heard the water shut off, loud in the pipes. Jerk. Maybe he wouldn’t.

He was eating a frozen dinner by the time John came back into the room, same clothes but he’d left the shades off. His hair was wet and curled around his ears, dampening the neck of his shirt. He made a face at Rodney’s dinner.

“That smells disgusting,” he said.

“No one’s offering,” Rodney said, his hand coming up like a protective shield. Convict style, Jeannie called it. John just huffed a laugh. He drummed a rhythmic little riff on the countertop with his fingers, then did the same thing on one of the cabinet doors. Then he started a circuit of the kitchen, doing a little tippy-tippy-tap-tap on every surface. Rodney pretended to ignore him. His appetite had wilted, but he kept shoveling in the chicken, mashed potatoes, cherry cobbler and peas indiscriminately.

“So how was your day, dear?” John asked, hopping up to sit on the counter beside the sink. “Save any good planets? Or do you just blow them up now? I always get that mixed up.”

“Very funny,” Rodney said.

“No seriously,” John said. “I want to know.”

“Classification?” Rodney said. “Non-disclosure agreement? Any of this ring a bell?”

“Sure,” John said smoothly, coming down off the counter to lean both elbows on the kitchen island, chin in his hands, his mismatched eyes staring laser hot into Rodney’s own. “But are you _happy_?”

Rodney put his fork down.

“Ecstatic,” he said, getting up and tossing the unfinished dinner into the garbage. “Excuse me.”

Rodney went into the bathroom and turned the shower on. Then he stood at the sink, and looked at his face in the mirror. He didn’t like what he saw. He never did. In fact he barely recognized the pale, sagging face with its dark shadowed eyes and receded hairline. He looked like his father. He looked old.

He turned away and undressed, stepped into the water and let it wash over him. This had been a mistake, he realized, taking Sheppard in. This was all the thanks he would get for it – Sheppard lashing out at him, blaming him.

As if he’d been the one who’d killed Elizabeth. He covered his face with his hands, but the memory still hurt like a physical thing. The panic he’d felt initiating the nanite activation program – he’d been certain enough that he’d neutralized their communication ability, and yet there had been no time to double check anything. And then the guilt when John caught them out. Guilty, even though he’d known he was right. How could John have expected him to let her…

But John was more than prepared for that, it had seemed. John’s anger had been so _personal_. And then the house of cards coming down. Elizabeth’s brief, confused moments of consciousness – the relief he’d felt at hearing his own name on her lips, and then the rollercoaster drop as her eyes rolled back in her head and she’d twitched and flailed.

And okay, it had been bad, but not as bad as John had thought. As Keller had thought. The nanites hadn’t undone his reprogramming – just a sort of specialized strike force designed to activate when such programming came into play. He’d figured it out almost instantly, could have overridden it -- of course he could have.

He’d explained it over and over at the hearing, answering the committee’s questions, but looking right at John, willing him to understand.

He’d needed ten minutes. Fifteen at the outside. Possibly twenty – it wasn’t an exact science. But John had given him _one_, counting down from sixty while Myers set up the EMP generator…

Rodney slammed his forearm against the wet tiled wall.

The pain cleared his head a little, but it left him drained. Exhausted. He managed to finish his shower and drag himself to the bedroom.

The television was on in the living room, but he didn’t have the energy to deal with Sheppard right now. He got into clean boxers and a t-shirt and crawled into bed.

Sleep wouldn’t come though. Instead he couldn’t stop thinking about Elizabeth’s last moments. The shape of the program as it had come together in his mind, John’s flat voice counting down the seconds. His fingers itched with the need to type. If it were happening now, how fast could he key in the new code?

He’d finished the program that would have worked – probably would have worked, the little voice in his head that demanded accuracy, insisted – before the Apollo had even found them. Finished it while Zelenka had overridden the safety protocols that let Atlantis jump the short distance to a habitable planet and timed himself over and over again while Sheppard went down to the Chair below and gave the order to jump.

Fifty/fifty, Radek had said and John hadn’t forbidden _him_ from bucking the odds and Rodney still couldn’t understand how it was different.

He’d tried to ask John after the short, terrible debriefing on the Apollo. Atlantis still hanging dead in space outside the conference room window and that condescending bastard Ellis questioning his every statement as if Rodney were the sort of incompetent lab chimp who had ass-kissed his way into his job. John had just sat there, blank-faced and monotone. Yes, sir. No, sir. Like Ellis was someone whose judgment mattered.

He’d tried to ask John then, as they left the tiny conference room. He’d really wanted to understand.

He hadn’t seen the punch coming, or even really understood that John had hit him until afterwards. Like everything to do with the workings of the human mind, the cause and the effect seemed to have no directional arrow. He’d asked John and then he was on the floor, his jaw aching, and he still had no idea how it had all gone wrong.

It suddenly seemed terribly unfair that Sheppard was not lying in the dark, reliving his worst nightmare. Perhaps having him so close at hand was not entirely without its compensations. Rodney got out of bed.

Sheppard was slumped on the couch in the dark, watching television with his sunglasses on. Or pretending to. Rodney picked up the remote and shut the TV off.

“It was a judgment call,” Rodney said. “You don’t have the right to the… the moral high ground.”

John laughed -- a harsh, unpleasant sound.

“So, really, it’s all about you, huh?”

“That’s not fair,” Rodney gritted out through clenched teeth. “And this isn’t funny. I don’t have your ironic distance or whatever you want to call it. This is something that matters to me.”

“Well, that’s different then,” John said, looking up at him from the couch. “’Cause it sure couldn’t matter to _me_.” And abruptly they were nose to nose. Rodney wasn’t even sure how he’d gotten there, fists balled tight, heart pounding.

John had moved… fast. Silently and suddenly within arm’s reach, smile dazzling. The sharp musty vinegar smell pouring off him…

Rodney felt the immediate fury of the moment ebb abruptly, leaving him queasy with fear. He pointed at John instead.

“This is a, a, a bug thing,” he said. It took a second or two to penetrate, but he saw the moment it did -- John’s grin dimmed a milliwatt. He was vibrating in place now and Rodney felt the back of his neck prickle, but he wasn’t about to back down. “It is. You’re all pumped full of enzyme. I remember exactly how much fun that is.” John opened his mouth, moved his jaw from side to side like he wanted to crack it. Then he shrugged.

“What if it is?” he said.

“We should,” Rodney’s mouth was bone dry. He had to swallow to make enough spit to go on. “We should lock you up.” John was already shaking his head, no, but Rodney had found his voice.

“Think,” he said. “This is why you came here. This is why—“ It hit him suddenly. This _was_ why John had come here. Despite hating Rodney’s guts and Rodney hating his and the five years and the chance that he could end up, if Rodney so decided, locked in the basement of the SGC with the X-Files and the alien autopsy… He was staring straight into John’s eyes – one inhuman and unreadable, the other bright with something Rodney really didn’t want to see.

He did see the moment John slid back into the mental pilot seat. The gauges flipping over from bug crazy to… well, John.

“Do it,” John said.


	2. Chapter 2

Rodney nodded, pushing past John with the kind of alacrity he hadn’t felt move him since Atlantis. He got the door open something like a split second, it seemed before John was pushing past him into the garage. Rodney slammed the door after him, locked the deadbolt and stood there, ear to the door, shaking with adrenaline rush. In the garage beyond he could hear muted arrhythmic thumping and grunting, like John was throwing heavy objects, or more likely just himself against the walls. It made Rodney want to scream and cover his ears at the same time.

Instead he pushed away from the door and called Keller’s number and, in answer to her ‘Hello’, said: “You need to get over here right now. And bring tranquilizers.” – while at the same time typing into Google ‘restraints’ and ‘Nevada bondage’ and ‘overnight delivery’.

In the annoying way of doctors, Keller had questions, which ended inevitably with her saying she’d be there as soon as she could. Google proved less cooperative and although there were apparently a million places one could buy handcuffs and manacles (and stocks with optional fucking machine and pink leather doggy style spreader bars and something called an ‘anal hook’ that had Rodney both horrified and intrigued because the girls in the pictures definitely seemed to be enjoying themselves) – there was no way to know if these were just toys or if they would actually work to restrain a person with superhuman strength and a fair measure of feral ingenuity.

Probably better to find a 24 hour box store and get some ropes and tire chains and padlocks and why hadn’t he already done all of this? He should have raided the SGC armory for restraints and a zat the day John had shown up at his door.

Something crashed in the garage and Rodney jumped and swore. This was bad. This was very, very bad. It was suddenly obvious that if John wanted out of the garage it wasn’t going to take him that long to break down the wood and spring automatic door. And then what were they going to do?

He paced, anxious to frantic, stopping at the door to listen to the sounds of destruction and the slowly lengthening silences between.

Eventually the silence didn’t end and Rodney, still pressed against the door, tried: “John?” Nothing. “John? Sheppard?” Nothing. Nothing. He hung on, cursing Keller for not breaking enough speeding laws. Maybe he’d knocked himself out. Maybe he was lurking in wait, clinging to the ceiling like The Fly, waiting to drop down on Rodney and kill him. Sometimes he really hated his brain.

“John?” he tried again. There was no answer, but now he realized he could hear something, a sort of quiet rhythmic brushing sound. Hunh. It didn’t sound like it was coming from some door-adjacent ambush point.

And what was Keller doing? Jogging here? The brushing stopped for a moment and Rodney held his breath. Something scraped softly across the floor, then the brushing resumed.

“John?” he said again. He slipped the key into the lock. The sound was ridiculously loud in the quiet house. He waited but nothing changed. He turned the key in the lock.

“I’m, uh, I’m opening the door,” he said. Inanely. “If that’s a bad idea, tell me now.” Nothing. Or… maybe there was something, low and indistinct. Rodney really hoped that it wasn’t a warning to stay away because he’d already turned the knob, cracked the door.

“Okay, I’m coming in…” The big room was dark. Rodney felt for the switch, clicked it a few times, but nothing happened. The only illumination was the angled wash of light that fell in through the door behind him. Even so, he could see that John had trashed the place. Stuff had spilled from split and tumbled boxes – books, papers, clothes, and oddly shaped lumps he couldn’t identify littered the floor.

He couldn’t see John, but he could hear the soft, brushing sound from the far, dark corner of the room.

“John…” he said. There was a pause in the noise and then:

“Yeah.” It sounded gravelly and hollow, but not crazed. Relief prickled through him like cold water. Rodney took a step into the room, pushing some debris out of the way with his foot.

“Are you...? I mean, did you…?” He peered into the corner, his eyes adjusting. He thought he could see Sheppard’s head behind what looked like a pile of boxes, maybe about where the bedroll had been. The brushing noise started up again, Sheppard’s head moving in time. John didn’t answer but by then Rodney had advanced far enough into the room that he could actually see him in the dim light, sitting on the floor inside what looked like a little fort of boxes, holding one arm tight to his chest with the other, rocking a little. He looked up at the sound of Rodney’s approach.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” John said. His face was shadowed, but the pain was evident in his voice.

“Yeah, well,” Rodney said, he squinted at John, trying to see if there was blood, but he couldn’t tell. Still. “You hurt yourself.”

“Yeah,” John rasped, half mocking. “Well…”

Rodney considered snapping something back, but he was suddenly way too tired.

“I called Keller,” he said. “She’s on her way.” John just grunted. Rodney toed around in the debris field, looking for the work light he knew was in there somewhere. Paper crinkled under his feet. All his papers had been back here – his doctoral theses, pre-Pegasus submission papers, all meaningless now. He wasn’t even sure why he’d been dragging them around the world from one storage room to another. It seemed abruptly like a ludicrous thing to have done. He sighed.

“Fuck,” John said, abruptly. “Sorry. Sorry about—“

“Whuh?” Rodney asked.

“This,” John nodded in the general direction of the mess, then sucked air sharply through his teeth. “Everything. Sorry…”

“Oh. Okay,” Rodney said, absently, distracted by a sudden worry. “You’re not just quietly sitting there bleeding out, are you?” he asked. “Because I can’t tell in the dark. I mean you’re obviously in pain and--”

“Not bleeding out,” John said.

“Okay,” Rodney said. There was silence for a while. Nothing but the sound of John’s pained breathing and Rodney’s rustling through the papers. His foot found something heavy and he bent down to see what it was – the twisted corpse of the lawn mower.

“Hunh,” he said, shifting it a little toward John. “That’s kind of scary.”

“I’ll pay for everything I broke,” John said. “I’ll clean up the mess.” He made another pained sound. “Jesus. I shouldn’t have come here.”

“Honestly?” Rodney said. “In a weird way I’m kind of flattered.”

“You would be,” said John.

“Yes, yes,” Rodney said. “McKay has an enormous ego. Never gets old. The thing is…” His toe found the thing he’d been looking for. He kicked it a couple of times to make sure no scorpions had decided to nest in it, although frankly if he was a scorpion he’d be miles away from this place by now, and picked it up. “The thing is, you could have gone to Radek.”

“Radek has a wife now,” John said. He was back to rocking softly.

“Or Jennifer,” Rodney untangled the light’s cord from whatever it was tangled with and tried to remember where the wall socket was. Ah, right, just above the work bench. “You were on better terms with either of them.”

“Obviously I’m not thinking too clearly,” John said.

“No,” Rodney said, feeling around until he found the plug. “I think you’re thinking very clearly. I think you know, deep down, that you can trust—“ Brilliant fluorescent light flooded the room, half blinding him. John yelled like he’d been struck.

“Sorry, sorry…” Rodney mumbled, fumbling around for the plug. He yanked it out, feeling the sudden darkness like a wash of cool air.

“Christ,” John said. Rodney could hear him twisting around in the dark, gasping quietly every time he moved.

“Sorry,” Rodney said again. He crouched down, feeling for John, flustered enough to want to help in some way. “I didn’t know it would be so—“ His hand bumped into cotton and solid flesh. John yelped..

“Sorry!” he cried again, backing away fast enough to stumble back on his ass. John was making a horrible, choked sound now, somewhere between a sob and a wheeze. For a moment Rodney was so alarmed he froze but, Christ, he knew that awful sound.

“That’s not--” he yelled, well and truly outraged. “That isn’t funny!” John just laughed harder, interspersed with gasps of real pain.

“No, “John panted. “It really, ow, really is.” And okay, maybe it was a little funny, if you were the kind of person who liked the Three Stooges, which he most certainly was not, although John clearly was. Or maybe it was just post-traumatic hysteria, which admittedly he’d never seen John engage in or… who knew what it was. It felt strangely normal. Comforting, even, not that Rodney was planning to admit that.

It didn’t last long, or turn into out and out hysterics, just kind of petered out, with the occasional hiccup which Rodney could hear even when he went back into the kitchen to search for a dimmer light source. He came up with a red plastic flashlight and a handful of white emergency candles, which necessitated further searching for batteries and matches. By the time he’d located those, John had gone quiet again.

He stuck the candles into coffee cups with a little dripped wax and lit one to carry in with him. John looked up squinting as he got closer and Rodney could see that his face was bruised, his nose had bled and the blood had dried and flaked off his lips and chin. The changed eye reflected eerily golden-green like a cat’s.

“Jesus,” he said. “You look terrible.”

John snorted.

“You're not looking so hot yourself, McKay." Then they both heard the sound of tires on gravel.

Keller insisted on the bright work light after all, although she made Rodney go and fetch John’s sunglasses before they turned it on and hung it from the hook where the hose used to be. Keller cut away John’s sweatshirt and in the pitiless light Rodney could see the weird bulge where John’s shoulder had dislocated forward, all the places he was scraped and bruised, the blue, ridged patches crawling his forearms, spreading across the wings of his ribs and disappearing down toward his flat, hairy belly.

The scales were the least horrifying part.

He wondered if it had covered his body like this last time. Strangely he had no memories to compare it to. He’d managed to avoid seeing much back then – just glimpses through that Obi Wan Kenobi robe they’d fitted him with for the mission to get the eggs. He certainly hadn’t tried or wanted to see more. It seemed – inappropriate, really. Presumptuous. Overly intimate. Kate, of course, had accused him of rationalizing his fears – fear of illness, fear of the unknown, fear of violence. His xenophobia. Fears he still believed were not actually neurotic in his situation. Aliens _had_ tried to kill him after all.

The quiet argument going on between John and Keller shook Rodney from his reminiscence. John was being his usual asininely cavalier self about the injuries. Keller insisted the shoulder needed a surgical reduction. John just shook his head.

“Super healing,” he said. “One of the few benefits. Just get it back in the socket and it’ll be fine.”

Keller hesitated, then turned to Rodney.

“I’ll need your help with this.”

“Oh no, no,” Rodney said, but he knew it was futile even before John said: “McKay…” in that expectant, proprietary tone he hadn’t missed at all.

It was just as awful as he’d anticipated, holding John’s hand and pulling bone through meat, while Keller guided the grotesque bulge with ungentle force. The unnatural feeling of it nearly made him puke and John made horrible strangled noises of agony until the ball suddenly slipped into the socket. Keller was quick with the gauze, mummifying John’s arm against his torso.

The bandages were as much a comfort to Rodney as to John, he suspected. Maybe more so as he sat back against the wall next to John, head down between his knees. He looked up when John asked how the cure was coming.

“It’s coming,” Keller said, noncommittally, and then, in response to the looks they both give her, added: “It’s complex stuff. And I’m not a geneticist. And, to be honest, the ideas Dr. Beckett was working with… You know, he took some shortcuts.”

“We know,” said Rodney. “It’s what you do in an emergency. Kind of like this is.” Keller just gave him one of her flat looks. Rodney wanted to shake her.

“This thing moves fast, Doc,” John said. “I don’t mind if you have to cut a corner or two.”

“Well, I do,” Keller said. “And not just for ethical reasons. From what you’ve described and what I’m reading, this isn’t progressing the way it did last time. It’s not like you’ve been re-infected with the same virus. This is more like a relapse, or long effect sequelae. Like… post-polio syndrome, or shingles, years after chicken pox. We don’t know what the progression is for this. Or whether the original serum will halt it.”

“But—“ Rodney started to say.

“But,” Keller cut him off firmly, turned to John. “I do have a few things that can alleviate some of your symptoms in the meantime. I can give you something to keep you lucid, for instance. Something for the itching, something that will hopefully regulate your metabolism a little better, something for the pain....”

“Sounds terrific,” John said, deadpan. “When do we start?”

At least the answer to that had been ‘right away’. Rodney was of course drafted for the heavy lifting. Clearing a path through the debris, he dragged the mattress and boxspring off the guestroom bed so John had something “decent”– Keller’s word.-- to sleep on. He found extra blankets (“Lots!” Keller said.) and helped get John onto the reconstituted bed.

While Keller did medical things, Rodney also brought in a ladder and changed the shattered light bulb, returning the room to normal and considerably less eerie lighting. Once he’d done that he came to a decision.

Keller was busy setting up an IV drip and John probably wasn’t sleeping, but he was possibly pretending to, under the shades. He had his head turned away.

“Are you going to be here for a while?” Rodney asked, quietly. “I have to get some things. Restraint… things,” he added in a low whisper. “Maybe an hour?” Keller just nodded.

He sped down the highway to the closest WalMart. It was actually fairly peaceful at this hour, giant and empty with its white light and muting sound baffles. He filled his cart with rope, chain, padlocks, a battery-powered lamp, duct tape and as an afterthought, peanut butter, grape jelly, bread, a box of power bars, mil. He half expected to be stopped as a potential serial killer at the cash, was mildly outraged that he wasn’t, and sped back home with his purchases.

Everything was as he’d left it, although Keller was removing the IV from John’s arm as he came in. John really seemed to be asleep this time.

“I gave him something to knock him out,” Keller said at the door, handing him a list of instructions to go with the box of pill bottles, bandages, tape and autoinject syringes. “He’s been minimizing his symptoms. I don’t think he’s slept in days. Or eaten.”

“How unlike him,” Rodney said, flatly.

“Well, keep an eye on him,” she said. “I really don’t like how he’s looking.”

“I have to work,” Rodney said. He’d already flaked out on two days and the first field test date for the jumper was coming up fast. Radek was probably on his twelfth mini-stroke of the week by now.

“You can’t leave him alone,” Keller said. “And I need to get into the lab and start synthesizing.”

“Fine, fine,” Rodney said. “I’ll figure something out.”

“I know you will,” Keller said. She patted his hand again, like he was some worried relative, and left.

Rodney looked at the instruction sheet and medication schedule. Next pills due in – he checked his watch – 15 minutes. He supposed he could let John sleep until then. But he found himself wandering into the garage anyway, sitting down in the chair he’d brought for Keller. Weariness washed over him like a slow wave and he yawned hugely. John stirred sleepily, his good hand flailing out as he stretched, brushing Rodney’s thigh.

“Hey,” he said, muzzily, patting Rodney’s leg with the back of his hand.

“Hey,” said Rodney. He was hyperaware of John’s hand, palm up, cool against his leg.

“You know what’s weird?” John said.

“What’s weird?” Rodney answered.

“I _do_ trust you,” John said. “That’s what’s weird. Isn’t that weird?” Rodney had to swallow hard a couple of times and in the end he couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he just kind of rested his hand on John’s hand and squeezed it before letting it go. Or trying to. John’s grip was pretty strong, even as he was going under.

“It’s weird,” John said again. “But I think even when I didn’t, I always did.” He sounded stoned and young and pretty damn surprised.

Oddly, Rodney felt exactly the same way.

John slept deeply through the night, barely waking enough to swallow the pills Rodney brought him before sinking back into a heavy, drugged sleep. Rodney only managed a fitful hour or two of restless unconsciousness, head pillowed on his arms between his two alarm clocks, mind foggy and whirring from the day’s excitement.

He gave up on sleep after the second pill call, made himself some coffee and went back to fiddling with the gravitational stability problem. The problem being that despite the thousands of man-hours he and Radek had spent on relearning the math he’d produced while nearing ascension they’d never fully recreated all the proofs. And while their combined experience and brain power had come up with many practical applications of what were still really only theories, there were a few areas where neither of them had managed to really get a handle on the physics – the manipulation of gravitational “fields” being one of those areas.

It was, Rodney occasionally thought, like standing on the shoulders of giants only to find that they were at the back of a crowd of much taller giants with enormous hats and wild hair-dos that all but obscured the important action on stage. More prosaically it was a lot of grinding of unworkable math with the best possible result being that they would figure out enough of what they needed to kludge a practical workaround.

That’s how they’d gotten the system mostly working. It was the ‘mostly’ part that was giving them trouble.

The hyper window for a puddlejumper was so small as to require pinpoint accuracy, whereas what they had achieved was more like barn-door accuracy with the end result of crashing five out of every six simulated puddlejumpers into the metaphorical barn door of normal space, while the hyperspace window comically opened and shut 7 to 15 AUs to the left.

These days Rodney worked with either the edge of anxious panic that he was missing the point or the dull resignation that the problems were simply unsolvable.

There had been a time, of course, when he’d approached things much differently. When he’d had an unshakeable inner confidence that the answer was just at the edge of his reach. Of course there had been a drive to succeed back then; the unshakeable trust that he – that _they_ could return to Atlantis and _fix_ things. He wasn’t sure when that had stopped being something he believed.

It hadn’t been the day that John had left. He knew that because despite everything there was a long time after that that he simply didn’t believe that John wasn’t just off sulking, or that he was, but that it was only a temporary thing. That he’d be back and he would… _they_ would… well, not ‘kiss and make-up’ obviously, but that this ugly thing between them wasn’t how it would be for the rest of their lives.

He supposed he’d known enough of John’s past that he should have known that John was the kind of person who could walk away. And that, despite the occasional foray into personal maturity, Rodney himself was the kind of person who would let him.

It all seemed like an incredible waste of time now. Like the lost years with Jeannie. What had any of that proved? He wondered if it had proved something to John, although he couldn’t imagine what. That he didn’t need Rodney? Outside of the realm of survival in Atlantis, that had been evident. To Rodney anyway. John didn’t _need_ anyone – Atlantis and everybody in her needed him.

Except it was John who was lying in a drugged sleep in Rodney’s garage, helpless and willingly, or at least voluntarily, at Rodney’s… was ‘mercy’ too strong a word for it? The thought made him uneasy. He had never thought of himself as a merciful man. And what he was doing here didn’t feel like mercy. It felt like failure. It felt like dangerous flailing around with somebody’s life – something he had grown so very casual about in Atlantis. All those toys the Ancients left behind. Ascension machines and planetary death rays and nanites and all of it so available to him.

And now, here he was -- without the toys but still trying to fix the damage that they’d – that _he’d_ done… He let his head drop forward into his hands.

The hyperspace window was ridiculously small. It had to be small because the power was limited. But the small size made the window unstable, which made it essential that the targeting be impeccable. You couldn’t increase the stability without increasing the power requirements. You couldn’t increase the power output because the source was already maximized. You couldn’t reduce the drain on the source without compromising the safety of the jumper. The only way to increase the stability was to make the targeting perfect. There was a way to do that, he _knew_ there was a way because he’d already figured it out once, therefore and ergo, he could do it again because… because…

He felt the epiphany happening before he thought it. A slow, unstoppable slide of things aligning in his brain and it had been so long since he’d had this happen it literally took his breath away. It was so... He didn’t have words. Beautiful. Perfect. So fucking obvious he wanted to smack himself in the forehead for being such a blind idiot.

His hands didn’t even shake as he typed out the formulae, line after line and yes, yes, Radek was going to have to check his math on this but he didn’t care. He was right. He knew he was right. It was the first time in years he’d known anything so completely.

He sent the draft off to Radek’s email and then picked up the phone and called his home number. Radek answered on the third ring, sounding sleepy and irritated. Rodney almost laughed aloud.

“Check your email,” he said. “And call me back.” He hung up and rubbed his hands together. God, it felt so _good_ to finally, finally be right again. Something beeped twice. For a second Rodney wondered when the hell he’d put something in the microwave. Then he remembered. He leaned across the island and grabbed the instruction paper. Two of the red pills at 3 am with water and food if he’ll take it.

Right, Rodney thought. Food. He could do food. He rifled through the white plastic grocery bags on his kitchen floor. Probably he should make something like soup, but he hadn’t bought soup. Why hadn’t he bought soup? Sick people needed soup and there was no time to go back now. He had to get back to the lab and Christ —

They could go back.

Sure, the SGC wasn’t going to let them go easily. It might be years. They might not want the original expedition members to go back at all, in fact, but Rodney had been around the US military and the IOA long enough to know that if something was big and shiny and even a little bit possible, someone was going to find a pressing reason to do it, no matter what the risk. And there was nothing bigger or shinier than a whole other galaxy full of Ancient technology.

Rodney couldn’t help rubbing his hands with the sheer glee of it. Pegasus! God, who knew, maybe even Atlantis was still achievable. The one area where he and his colleagues had actually had some success advancing Ancient tech was in their development of defensive and offensive capabilities against the human-form Replicators.

That had been in the early days of their retreat, when they were still unable to shake the terrifying thought that the Replicators were just waiting for the right moment to invade the Milky Way.

That threat, as far as they knew, had never materialized, but Rodney doubted the SGC and the DoD had stopped weapons development because of a little thing like that.

Oh God, they could go _back_! The alarm beeped another reminder and right, yes, pills and wait until he told John…

It stopped him cold.

He couldn’t tell John.

John had walked away -- from the Air Force, from the Stargate program, from everything – and he hadn’t just burned his bridges behind him, he’d taken off and nuked his bridges from orbit. The SGC was never letting John go back to Pegasus.

It was a cold thought, settling low in Rodney’s belly.

Of all the things they’d said to one another in the last few days, the one absolute truth that not even John could deny was this: John hadn’t come to Rodney for a cure.

Keller was not answering her phone at 3:27 in the morning but there was no way Rodney could _not_ go into the lab right now so he left a message so vague as to be incomprehensible and went to see if John was awake..

He wasn’t, and no amount of gentle shaking and not so gentle poking resulted in so much as a grunt out of him. Whatever pills he had in him had knocked him cold. Rodney debated for all of thirty seconds before writing out a post-it note and sticking it to John’s bandaged chest. Then he put the cordless phone in John’s lax hand, made sure that nothing was imminently in danger of catching fire or shorting out and headed out on the highway.

By that time, Radek had called him three times from the road, firing questions like a P-90, and unable to comprehend why Rodney wasn’t already at the base, designing the new schematics they were going to need.

Rodney, who was busy working out the possible disasters that could befall John while he was away, couldn’t come up with any responses more elaborate than: “Don’t ask,” and “It’s complicated,” and “Jesus, what are you, National Enquirer? Can you please just put your attention into getting to the base and getting the specs out without having a cell-phone related accident?”

His own drive to Area 51 was no less attention-challenged and thank God there was no one else on the road because even he wasn’t able to pull stuff up on his laptop, talk on the phone, think about the miracle of hyperdrive technology, and still manage to limit the Volvo to a single lane all the way there.

His tragic death in a single car accident was fortunately avoided, however and Radek already had the coffee maker going when he arrived.

“You know I think you are right about the 16 point pod nozzles after all,” Radek said as Rodney walked onto the hangar floor. He was speaking from inside the guts of the half-disassembled drive engine, examining the baseball-sized burnished metal nozzle assembly.

“Me? Right about everything?” Rodney said, walking over and pulling out the crystal trays that controlled the drive servos. “_That_ never happens.”

“One set of pod nozzles is hardly everything,” Radek said. He pulled a tiny screwdriver out of the tiny kit in his breast pocket, sat down on a housing panel and began taking it apart.

“Ah, and that’s why _I’m_ the mastermind and _you’re_ the henchman,” Rodney said, tugging at a bundle of braided, rainbow-coloured wiring, part of his original jury rigged interface, if he wasn’t mistaken. The bundle unfolded into a long cable and Rodney pulled his voltometer out of his pocket and started testing.

“Ahh,” Radek said. “I thought that was because you are evil.” Rodney turned to glare, but when he looked over his shoulder Radek was grinning at him. Rodney rolled his eyes, but it felt good.

“Yes, yes, it’s all very exciting,” he said, turning away so it wouldn’t show. “Although it might be more exciting if we stop congratulating ourselves and actually make it work.”

“As far as I remember,” Radek said. “You never had a problem doing both.”

Sixteen hours later, Rodney had to agree. They were nowhere near finished and the puddlejumper lay more in pieces than intact, but the lab floor was a hive of excited activity and punching the new data into the simulations gave them a probable accuracy rate of over 93% which really was close enough for them to seriously rock and roll.

Rodney rolled out from under the main engine housing and stood up. The room tilted under his feet and Radek caught his arm before he toppled over.

“Go home,” Radek said. “Get some sleep. We’ll try to survive without you for a few hours.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Rodney said, blinking to clear his vision. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept but it couldn’t have been _that_ long ago.

“You’re right,” Radek said. “You’re in no shape to drive and I’m tired too. I’ll take you--”

“What? No!” Rodney said. “Of course I can drive.”

“Good,” said Radek. “Off you go.”

John was in the kitchen when Rodney stumbled in, late afternoon. The sense of well-being that had floated him home full of half formed thoughts of pod nozzles and gravitational pump relay modeling suddenly vanished, transmuting almost instantly into a cold, heavy lump of guilt.

“Oh,” Rodney said, taken aback. “Should you be up?”

John turned to him, eyes hidden behind shades, face expressionless and for a moment Rodney felt the alien looking out at him. Then John’s stomach rumbled loudly and the feeling passed – John was just John again, skinny and grizzled. He was shirtless and in daylight the bruises were dark and ugly, pooling out from under the bandages and chest hair. No beer gut or tattoos, though. Rodney couldn’t help staring.

“Got your note,” John said, startling him. “Wasn’t sure what a ‘lob emorgandy’ was but I figured it was important.”

“Lob…?” Rodney said, blankly. “Oh. Lab. Emergency.” His eyes had wandered. John’s forearms were covered with what looked like dried bluish mud dotted with thorny little barbs and nubs. The changed skin was finer around his ribs, scales overlapping, pearly but dull. Chitinous. It made Rodney’s gorge rise – not just the thing itself, the obvious wrongness of it, but because it evoked the kind of ugly pity he sometimes felt for street people picking through garbage cans. Much as he might have wished for some kind of payback for John, he knew he’d never wanted this.

“You okay?” John asked.

“Me?” Rodney said. “I’m not the one with… I mean… are you? That is… are you okay?”

John shrugged. Winced.

“Your phone rang a few times,” he said.

“Oh, I should probably…”

“Yeah.”

But the phone was back in its cradle, and getting to it would require squeezing by John and Rodney hesitated. John’s stomach rumbled again.

“Lunch?” Rodney asked.

“Frozen chicken?” John asked dubiously.

“Peanut butter sandwiches?” Rodney countered, pointing to the white plastic bags still not entirely unpacked from last night’s trip to the mega mart. John peered into the bags, extracted bread, peanut butter, chains, padlocks…

“Peanut butter and bondage, huh?” John said.

“Or…jelly,” Rodney said.

“Jelly it is,” John said, lifting out the jar of grape jelly.

Rodney made a pile of peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches and John got milk out of the fridge. For the first time in years Rodney wished he’d thought to buy something healthy – some grapes or a bag of salad or something. He used to eat all kinds of rabbit food, on Atlantis and offworld. Had even liked it. The phantom flavour of some alien stew or other chased itself across his palate, uncaught.

They sat across from one another on either side of the island, eating. The peanut butter was strange and sticky in Rodney’s mouth. Too sweet, too thick, impossible to swallow. He washed it down with milk that tasted too bland and realized he wasn’t hungry at all. He watched John eat instead, mesmerized by his own exhaustion and the mechanical way John ate – attention focused completely on the task of holding the sandwich together one handed and without a hint of enjoyment. He tried to remember if it was always that way.

John glanced up between bites, catching him in the act of staring.

“What?” he asked, eyes narrowing behind the dark lenses. Rodney shook his head, helplessly.

“What have you been doing with yourself?” he asked, surprising both of them. John shrugged, took another bite of sandwich.

“’Difference does it make?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Rodney said. “I thought we’d reached that point of civility last night.”

John looked at him, expression unreadable. Rodney wondered if he remembered admitting that he trusted Rodney. If he would admit remembering it if he did. Maybe the same questions were going through his head. Rodney felt like he’d spent a lifetime second-guessing John Sheppard. It had always been easier, in the end, than asking. But John seemed to have come to a different conclusion.

“Fair enough,” he said, putting his sandwich down on the plate. “Well, I flew for United for about a year, but apparently I wasn’t enough of a team player for them so they asked me to move on; spent another year flying corporate hacks from city to city. That didn’t work out too well either,” he gave a small, rueful laugh and Rodney wondered what he’d done and to whom, and missed being able to share it. “After that I headed north fhrough California, Oregon, Washington – flew water bombers in the summer, back country search and rescue in the winter. Lately I’ve been working my way around Alaska. Bush work mostly, tourists, hunters, supply runs. Whatever. It’s quiet.”

“Like Antarctica,” Rodney said.

“No,” John said. “Not like Antarctica.” He picked up his sandwich again, turned it around like he was looking for the last place he bit so he could stick to some pre-approved route around the crust.

“I’ve been at Area 51 the whole time,” Rodney volunteered.

“Yeah?” John said. He didn’t sound surprised though. Well it wasn’t really much of a surprise, Rodney guessed. What else was he going to do with himself? Teach?

“Yeah,” said Rodney. “I—“ There was no way he could finish that sentence. John no longer had the clearance to know anything about his life. The important parts anyway. John knew that, of course, and it bothered Rodney that he wasn’t even poking at the boundaries now.

“It’s what I’m best at,” Rodney said, lamely. It wasn’t a lie. There was nowhere else on Earth where he could do the work he was capable of doing.

“You seem to have adapted,” John said. And that was true too, except it wasn’t something he actually thought about any more. He’d probably felt the need to justify his lack of connection to place a handful of times in his younger days, but the truth was the _where_ had never really mattered. He never found the weather anywhere particularly accommodating, he didn’t care what delights a city provided beyond edible food, comfortable shelter and high speed internet -- and he wasn’t in any way a fan of history. As long as the work was there, was real, everything else was a matter of mediating his discomforts. Sure, he’d hated Siberia more than say Toronto, but that was more because of the circumstances of his exile.

Antarctica had been just as bitterly cold and he hadn’t had much complaint about that except for the lack of decent toilets and showers. Area 51 was basically Antarctica with heat instead of cold and at least here he could leave the house without a snowsuit.

Only Atlantis had ever been different, or seemed different in his memory, even if he couldn’t quite remember how. He only remembered that time when the Ancients had sent them back to Earth, how much he’d longed to be back there. It had felt like a physical ache, like something out of childhood – what he’d realized at some point was what everyone else called ‘homesickness’.

He thought maybe he’d felt that way throughout the hearings too, but it was hard to remember anything but his anger and his bitterness and his fear. He certainly hadn’t felt anything of the kind lately.

Really, his time on Atlantis seemed more like a dream. One of those dreams where you’re a different person from your normal self but you know it’s you, somehow. That person had been willing, even eager sometimes to take insane risks, to head out into the great and uncomfortable unknown. He’d been so full of… something. Not anything as corny as ‘hope’ or ‘faith’, but he’d been the kind of person who thought about… the Future, in capital letters. Who’d wanted friends, a wife, children. Connection. Who’d expected to get them.

Now the future he envisioned, if he thought about it, was mostly a grim determined effort to keep going, succeeding and surpassing his immediate competition until there weren’t any more puzzles to be solved. Sure, he wouldn’t turn down a Nobel prize – fame and fortune, money and research labs, his own TV show – why not? But he was also pretty sure that declassification wouldn’t happen in his lifetime. All there was, all there ever would be was this – this house, this work, this life…

“You ever miss it?” John asked. He’d abandoned his sandwich, and his hands flat on the table on either side of his plate. The knuckles were rough, and dark with blue-gray callus. Rodney couldn’t take his eyes off them. He almost wanted to reach out and put his hands on top of them, feel them, because he knew the solidity wasn’t an illusion. John was really here and that meant…

The feeling was like a punch to the heart, it hurt that much. He wasn’t sure he could even breathe, let alone speak, but there was his voice, bland and just a little tight.

“Sure,” he was saying. Lying. “You know, like you do…” John’s reaction took him by surprise. He seemed to crumple somehow, scrubbing angrily at his hair with one hand.

“Jesus,” he said, sounding almost breathless. “I wish—“

The phone rang, cutting him off, his wish unspoken to Rodney’s great relief. Keller was on the other end of the line. She sounded tired but excited and she was on her way over.

She had the cure.

“I thought this was going to be a lot harder to synthesize,” Keller said, clipping together the white plastic pieces of some medical-looking contraption. “But once I got access to the Lantean synthesizing apparatus, it all came together like a dream.”

They were back in the garage. John was lying on the bed. The light was dim enough that he’d taken the shades off and Rodney was shocked to realize that sometime in the last few days his other eye had started to change. Why didn’t John ever _mention_ these little details? Rodney, meanwhile, was busy installing the chain and padlock restraints -- ‘to be on the safe side’, Keller had said. The chains seemed distressingly puny around John’s wrists and ankles.

“That’s great,” John said, seemingly ignoring Rodney’s handiwork. “But is it going to work?”

“Well,” Keller said. “I’m actually cautiously optimistic. Carson himself speculated a bit on the direction possible long term sequelae would take and I think, given your current condition, he was on the right track. I used his original formula with the supply of iratus stem cells and tweaked it along those lines. It won’t be pleasant…”

“I don’t remember much from the first time around,” John said. “But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t pleasant then either.”

“It’s pretty hard on your human system,” Keller said. “But yes, I think it will work. Should work…” She frowned.

“What aren’t you telling us?” Rodney said.

“Nothing you don’t already know, Rodney,” she said. “Genetic engineering is not my field, and xenopharmacology is not my specialty. Carson’s notes are incomplete, and the iratus stem cell sample we’re using is, frankly, old. Now I think we’ve got it right, and if I could bring in somebody from the SGC who—“

“No!” they both said.

“Yes, yes, I know your objections,” she said. “I’m just saying, this is the best chance we have without bringing in actual experts, which is all the chance you’re allowing at this point. If it doesn’t work…”

“If it doesn’t work, we’ll try again,” John said, firmly. Keller glanced at Rodney, before clipping the last of the hoses into the device which Rodney could now see was some kind of intravenous infuser. It looked.. big.

“You ready?” Keller asked John.

“Yep,” he said without hesitation. Rodney himself would have liked a moment to breathe as he watched Keller slide a needle into the back of John’s hand and tape it down.

“I’m going to go… out…there,” he said, faintly getting to his feet.

“Actually,” said Keller. “I could use another pair of hands.”

“No, really,” said Rodney. “I’m not good with medical stuff.”

“McKay,” John said. “Stick around and help the nice lady who’s saving my life.”

“Nice _doctor_ lady,” Keller corrected, grinning pointedly at John. John grinned back his acquiescence.

“Oh, that’s just typical,” Rodney groused, sitting back down on the floor by the wall. John had made an attempt to tidy the huge mess of papers, stacking things in rough piles against the opposite wall although he’d obviously been hampered by his one-armed state. Rodney picked up a stack and started to flip through it while Keller adjusted the drip of something on the infuser. There were four bags hanging from the rack – one large bag of clear fluid and three smaller bags of which one was clear, one clear but straw colored and one opaque and disturbingly pearly like cream-rinse conditioner. She had also hooked John up to an automated blood pressure machine that bleeped and sighed at regular intervals.

The papers in his lap were a jumble, Rodney realized. Letters, receipts, page after page of thesis materials in the cramped precise handwriting of his youth. It would take ages to put it all back in order. There were photos too. Pictures of himself accepting his undergraduate diploma in physics at Northeastern, accepting the Conant prize, looking skinny and disgruntled in his robes, scowling under thick, beetling brows. He tucked the photos away, not liking to look at his young, anxious self. The blood pressure cuff sighed and he looked up. John’s eyes were closed and he was looking peaky – pale and sweaty. The machine bleeped and John grimaced. Rodney was about to say something when Keller turned to him and said, in a low, calm voice:

“Hand me that basin, would you?” Rodney did and it was all so serene it came as a total surprise to him when John suddenly rolled over and threw up violently into it.

“It’s okay,” Keller said. “I thought that might happen.”

“Thanks for the advance warning!” Rodney squeaked. He’d leapt to his feet, pretty sure there had been splash. John hiccupped something that sounded like a laugh and threw up again. Keller handed Rodney the basin.

“Go empty this, rinse it out and bring it back,” she said, coolly. “He might throw up again. Consider yourself warned.”

“Oh my God,” Rodney said, nearly gagging, but did as he was told and later even managed to bring back a damp washcloth and some ice chips he’d made by hitting some ice cubes with a wrench.

The next hour redefined hell for him though. Not just other people, he thought. Other people throwing up into a bowl you had to carry through your own house, time after time, _that_ was hell. But John eventually subsided into dry heaves and then just the occasional shudder. In due course he dropped off to sleep. Rodney must have done the same because the next thing he knew, Keller was shaking him awake from a dream in which he’d managed to harness some kind of giant naquadah powered snake and was trying to figure out where in the desert he could possibly want to go.

“Whuh?” he managed, gummily. The garage still smelled of vomit.

“He’s asleep,” she whispered. “The serum’s been fully infused and now I’ve got to make an appearance at the hospital. I’ll be back in a couple of hours to check up on him.”

“Wait,” Rodney said, feeling panic rise. “What if he throws up again.”

“I think you know what to do for that by now,” Keller said. “Anyway I think that was the worst of it. If anything does happen, you have my cell.”

“Happen like what?” Rodney asked, his stage whisper loud enough to get a look of disapproval. Without answering, she got up and left Rodney sitting there, rubbing at his face, trying to think of all the possible horrible emergencies that he wasn’t prepared for.

For a while he sat and watched John, carefully, as though he might erupt at any moment. John slept on peacefully and after a while Rodney got bored enough to go and retrieve his laptop and check his mail. Thirty seven messages from the lab; twelve from Radek’s personal address. He skimmed through it, spitting out answers to the more interesting questions, demanding clarification from the people who weren’t making any sense. Radek had a couple of good suggestions for recalibrating the red-shift sensor array and he followed up on those for a while but it all seemed weirdly distant and theoretical. Eventually he too dozed and didn’t wake again until Keller returned, bringing the scent of the desert in with her.

Even then, he didn’t head off to work but only staggered to his own bed and fell asleep on top of the covers with his shoes still on.

The ringing phone woke him. The sun was up and shining, nuclear-bright around the edges of his blackout curtains and he fumbled the receiver to his ear. It was Radek on the other end wanting to know if he was planning to come in some time this year as they had this small unimportant project to complete. Rodney muttered something scathing, hung up and staggered out to the kitchen where the smell of brewing coffee felt like a caress.

He poured himself a cup and rubbed his stubbled face. He poked his head into the garage. John was still asleep as far as he could tell. Keller sat at John’s bedside working on a laptop. She looked up at the sound of Rodney in the doorway.

He mimed and mouthed: “I’ve got to go” at her and she gave him a jaunty little wave. Right. A quick shower, shave and change and he was out the door, still not entirely sure he was awake.

Twenty hours later, he _still_ wasn’t sure he was awake, but he and Radek were jumping up and down and pounding each other on the back and the entire lab was cheering. After that there was sweet, fizzy champagne in plastic cups and exhausted babbling and off key singing and it wasn’t until Rodney took a second to hit the washroom that he realized his phone was beeping at him.

The time on the message was several hours ago and Keller’s voice on his voice mail was tired and strained.

“Get your ass back here, McKay,” the message said. A stab of fear prickled through him like electricity. He grabbed his laptop and his keys and slipped out while Radek led the lab techs in another round of _Lobachevsky_..

He called Jennifer’s cell a bunch of times on the way home, but kept getting switched right to voice mail. He _hated_ voice mail. What was the point of having a goddamn cell phone if you weren’t going to answer it in emergencies? He threw the phone down on the seat beside him, only picking it up after he’d pulled to a gravel-spraying stop in the driveway. He hit the redial once more as he stepped out into coolish night air that smelled of sagebrush and dust.

The door opened before the phone even connected, Jennifer standing, arms folded impatiently in the wedge of yellow light. A faint bass thumping drifted out into the night.

“What happened?” Rodney asked, anxiously. “And why don’t you answer your phone? And is that… music?”

“Colonel Sheppard seems to think so,” she said in that quirky deadpan way she used to tease him with. “And I knew it was you calling. If you weren’t coming, I didn’t want to hear your excuses.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Rodney said. “Well, I’m here now, so…”

“So,” she said, holding out her hand, palm up. “Key, please?”

“Key?”

“Is that McKay?” Sheppard’s voice came from somewhere in the back. He sounded… normal. Drawling.

“Is he…?” he asks, unable to wrap his head around the idea, but Jennifer was smiling.

“Come and see for yourself.” He followed her back inside, through the kitchen and to the garage where the music -- something with lots of guitars and a driving rhythm – was louder, although the sound quality was tinny and terrible.

John was sitting up on the bed, one wrist and both ankles dripping chains like Hell’s Angels’ jewelry and Rodney’s ancient boom-box at his feet. There were no bandages on his one free arm, only a mottle of old and faded looking bruises and his skin…

Rodney stared and turned back to gape at Jennifer.

“He’s cured?”

“He can actually hear you, Rodney,” she said, dryly.

“It’s true,” John said. “I can.” Rodney turned back to gape with equal slack-jawed amazement at John, who was actually smiling.

“What did that take?” Rodney said. “Ten minutes?”

“More like ten hours,” Jennifer said. “And he’s not cured yet… but, well on his way. The skin lesions have started to de-lichenify, pupils less sensitive to light, core temperature up to low-normal human range, metabolism coming back on line…”

“And now with forty percent fewer bug parts.” John grinned. Rodney couldn’t help grinning back. Then he frowned.

“What about the… crazy bug rage?” he asked. Jennifer looked slightly less certain.

“His brain chemistry isn’t quite normal, yet,” she said. “But his adrenaline and noradrenaline levels are falling hourly. Serotonin and dopamine are down. GABA is within acceptable ranges.”

“Which in English means?”

“Well, I’d say he’s as stable as… the average postal worker.”

“That’s your idea of reassuring?”

“The average postal worker can’t bend a lawn mower,” John said. Jennifer nodded, deadpan. Great, Rodney thought. They could take their act to Vegas. They’re here all week, ladies and gentlemen. Don’t forget to tip your waiter. But he found he _was_ reassured. John looked tired, stubbled, bruised and blotchy, and… human.

“Give him the key to the padlocks, Rodney,” Keller said, and then to John: “And you: take a shower, have some more broth and dry toast and get some sleep.”

“No dancing?” John asked.

“Maybe tomorrow,” she said, smiling again. “I’m pretty beat.”

Rodney took a deep breath and fished the padlock key out of his breast pocket.

“You’re sure this is a good idea,” he asked Jennifer over his shoulder.

“Come a little closer, McKay,” Sheppard said. “You can tell for yourself how good an idea a shower is.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Rodney. “Thanks for the _medical_ opinion.”

“I think it’s a good idea, Rodney,” she said. “Give him the key.”

He did. Sheppard made quick work of the shackles and stood, swaying a little. He rolled his shoulders, stretched his neck.

“Well, if you’ll excuse me,” he said, addressing them with mock formality. “Lady. Gentleman.” They moved to let him pass. Rodney did catch a whiff of him this time. Old sweat, sickness, unwashed male. Not Rodney’s favorite smell, but there wasn’t a hint of the strange alien tang.

God, maybe it was going to work.

He hadn’t even realized how much he’d been doubting, but the sudden hope made him almost giddy with relief.

Jennifer was watching him. Fondly, maybe.

“You need to eat something too,” she said. “And get some rest. It looks like you had a pretty exciting day yourself.” She gestured with her chin and Rodney looked down at his shirt, which he hadn’t noticed before was smudged with dust and machine oil, inky fingerprints across his belly, drying pit stains under the arms.

“Yeah,” he said. “It was…uh…”

“Classified?”

“Yeah,” he said. He looked down at the floor, suddenly utterly exhausted. Felt Jennifer’s small dry hand against his cheek, cool and comforting and suddenly he had his arms around her, chin tucked over her shoulder. It was awkward, one of her arms was trapped against her side by his embrace, but he couldn’t seem to help himself.

“Thank you,” he said into her hair. “Thank you. For coming here. For doing this. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she whispered. stroking the back of his head gently while he pulled himself back together.

Eventually she said:

“I have to go, Rodney.” Rodney nodded and let her disentangle herself. Hello, awkward, he thought. But there was no judgment in her expression, just that same sad fondness as she turned and left him standing in the light.

Rodney closed the door and headed back inside. All he wanted to do was shower and crawl into bed, but John was apparently communing with the shower gods – Christ, was that… singing? Rodney decided that the only option here was denial. He slumped on the living room couch and turned the TV on.

The next thing he knew, it was bright, brainfrying day again and his back was seriously pissed with him. Also, someone was coming in the front door. Rodney jumped, his hand scrabbling on the floor by the sofa for what he eventually realized was a non-existent firearm. Annoyed he flailed, trying now to sit up, succeeding only in tangling himself in the blanket that someone, presumably John, had draped him in.

It was all for naught anyway, defense-wise. By that time the intruder was in the house and standing over him, clean-shaven and leather jacketed, brandishing plastic grocery bags.

“Morning,” John said. He held up the bags. “Got some breakfast.” Rodney grunted ambivalently. He was pretty sure those were apples in there. Maybe the square-sided shape of a quart of milk. Nothing remotely like donuts or Egg McMuffins. Vaguely he remembered thinking he should start eating more healthy type food. Must have been the exhaustion talking. He got to his feet and stopped dead, suddenly coming to full consciousness.

“You went outside,” he said. “Among people.”

“I was getting a little stir-crazy,” John said, and before Rodney could ask, added: “Ordinary _human_ stir-crazy. You were dead to the world, so I decided to take the bike out, see how she was running.”

“In the middle of the night,” Rodney said. John shrugged.

“It was almost sun-up, actually,” he said.

“Where did you go?” Rodney asked.

“Oh, you know,” John said, faux-casually. He moved off into the kitchen, talking over his shoulder as he unpacked the plastic bag. “Down the road some. When I hit Vegas I got the idea to do a little grocery shopping. Man, that city never sleeps.”

Rodney had followed him into the kitchen. .John had found a big bowl somewhere and was piling into it apples, bananas, mangos, plums, red grapes as big as his thumb.

“You rode a hundred miles to buy fruit,” Rodney said.

“And back,” John said, his mouth quirking a little in his smooth face. “She makes good time.”

“And this was a good idea?” Rodney asked. John shrugged again, and picked up an apple.

“Hey,” he said. “You know what they say about an apple a day…” He examined the apple in question for a moment and then bit into it deeply, crunching away and looking disturbingly rapturous. Rodney shook his head. There was some old coffee left in the coffeemaker. He poured some into a cup and stuck it in the microwave.

“I need to get back to the lab,” he said. “Do you think you can manage not to ride to Chicago for pizza while I’m gone?”

“No promises,” John said. Then he yawned, fisting the small of his back. “Might nap first though.”

“Just, you know,” Rodney said. “Don’t overdo it.” John yawned again, making ‘I know, I know…’ gestures with his hand as he headed back into the garage.

“I’m serious, Sheppard,” Rodney called after him.

“Have fun at work, McKay,” John’s voice came from the garage door.

Nobody listens, Rodney thought, drinking the last of the terrible reheated coffee, but he couldn’t deny that he felt lighter inside because of it.

The next week passed in a surreal blur of unrelenting work to get the jumper ready for the now confirmed test date and coming home to the strange domesticity of John cooking; John tinkering with his bike; John sorting and repacking the mess in the garage, attempting to fix the lawn-mower and then, when that proved impossible, going on an online yard equipment buying spree . A John who was definitely better every day.

The bruises faded and were gone. The bluish crust of scales smoothed and faded too until none were visible, even when John peeled off his sweaty t-shirt en route to the shower. Last to change back were his eyes, but eventually even those reverted too and Rodney found himself looking across the table over his plate of steak, baked potato and salad at a John with two human eyes, bright and round-pupilled, with deep laugh-lines at the outside edges.

“What?” John asked.

“You look… good,” Rodney said. “Healthy.”

John nodded. “I feel pretty good,” he said, pushing his salad around with his fork. “I think… I think maybe I was sick for longer than I realized.”

“Yeah?” Rodney said. But he sort of knew what John meant. He’d felt something like that for years. Just a vague sense of malaise, a kind of inner discomfort he could never put his finger on but that never really went away. He was glad John was maybe free of it. Maybe now Jennifer could work on a cure for him too.

“Hey, listen,” John said. “Let me do something for you.”

“Like what?” Rodney asked, suspiciously.

“Come on,” John said, putting his fork down. “I’ll show you.”


	3. Chapter 3

“This is insane!” Rodney yelled fervently into the warm, thick leather shoulder of John’s jacket. Not that John could hear him with the wind whipping over them, solid and cold as a waterfall, but he could feel the insane-type laughter rumbling through John’s chest so maybe it was just that obvious. He couldn’t believe he’d let John talk him into riding on the back of the big, black, frankly terrifyingly be-chromed motorcycle. There wasn’t even a seat -- just a backwards-slanting hard little cushion perched over the rear wheel with tiny little pegs that he had to jam his feet onto, knees somewhere around his ears, nothing to hold onto but John, who he was clutching around the middle like he was the last stanchion between Rodney and the Abyss.

Which, in fact, he was.

“I mean totally, unequivocally, irredeemably bug-fuck crazy,” Rodney went on. “Pun fully intended, by the way!” He couldn’t even hear himself over the roar of the bike, the roar of the road, the roar of the wind but he knew he was panting. He knew his heart was thumping crazily in his chest. That he was grinning or grimacing, lips pulled back off his teeth by the wind.

They were going so fast now. Way too fast. Could bikes even go this fast or was this just some expression of John Sheppard’s id, tearing down the road? It felt like utter madness, utter out of control freedom – like those ants Homer Simpson freed. ‘Freedom, horrible freedom’ – Rodney wanted to shout it out loud. The desert flashed by – black on black to the sides, silver shot blips of the road’s white lines when he looked over John’s shoulder. The only still point was the big silver dollar moon, following them along the road.

Up hill and down – the deep growl as the bike accelerated, the sucking pull of gravity when John leaned into a turn. And then the bike was slowing, slowing.

So soon? Rodney chased the fleeting thought down and hit it with a bat until it died. Thank God, he meant. John pulled the bike over to the side of the road in a lazy glide and held it there on one foot, engine idling. He unfastened his helmet, pulled it off and scrubbed a hand through his hair.

Now that they weren’t moving, Rodney could feel how deaf he’d become. How the engine vibration ran deep into his bones. He could barely tell that he was breathing, connected to warmth and stillness only where his hands came around John’s waist. He was _not_ letting go. John twisted inside his grip and Rodney felt the knock on his helmet. He looked up, yelling: “What?” at the top of his lungs. All around him the desert was grey on brown, silver on black, crazy jigsaw shadows of brush and rock and moonlight. John was pointing ahead and to the left.

Rodney scanned the dusty moonscape until he saw the dry sinuous thread of the dirt road.

“Oh, you have _got_ to be kidding me,” he said, shaking his head, no, no, NO. No fucking way! But John was nodding just as enthusiastically, giving Rodney the thumbs up sign and if Rodney had half a mind to just jump the hell off the back of this thing, he never had the chance to even get his legs uncramped before John had his helmet back on. Was revving the bike again, jarring Rodney as he swung his weight back into the center and hit the throttle.

If going down the highway had been like riding whitewater rapids in the dark, bumping down the winding dirt road was like riding along a current at the bottom of the ocean. Here, without the black of tarmac to contrast with, the moonlight turned the shadows indigo, sagebrush and Joshua trees made dark, alien silhouettes that flashed by fast and close, or slow and far away. Rodney held on to John and rode and rode.

Hours passed, or minutes. Rodney felt numb, battered and yet unexpectedly warm at his core. His fear hadn’t left him, but it was less of a thing spiking up inside of him and more like the cold inexorability of the wind – just _there_, a thing to be borne. This time when he looked up to find the anchoring moon, it felt like the bike had gone still inside its bubble of noise, while the desert ground away under its wheels, slowly, slowly turning the planet under the sky.

It felt uncomfortable and terrifying and…good. Inexplicably good.

He hardly noticed they had slowed, until John finally brought the bike to a stop and shut the engine off.

The silence was deafening – almost literally -- and Rodney popped his ears, over and over, like that would help. He scrabbled a little when John pulled away from him, settling the bike on its kickstand and dismounting. Rodney needed John’s help to get off. His legs had frozen into position, and he staggered and stomped across the dirt, trying to get some feeling back into them.

When he turned back, John was standing, hands on hips, staring off toward the distant mountains, pale blue-gray against the black sky. The moon was not where Rodney had expected it to be. He must have gotten turned around with the dark and the driving. Rodney reached up to wipe chill sweat off his forehead and encountered his helmet. No wonder he was deaf. He yanked the helmet off. The sound of his steps in the dirt seemed very loud, as was the chilly wind what whistled past his ears.

“There are probably snakes out here,” Rodney said. “And scorpions.”

“Probably,” John said, not turning around. Rodney chewed at his lip and knew he was supposed to be saying something – maybe how beautiful it was out here, because it sort of was, in an eerie, haunted landscape sort of way. The way any huge chunk of uninterrupted nature was, if not actually beautiful, then sort of magnificent. Or… something. Was that what John had wanted to do for him? Because it seemed… odd. Un-John-like. And besides, Rodney _lived_ in the goddamn desert. This wasn’t much different than what he saw out of his car window every day for the last five years.

Still, it obviously meant something.

“You like it out here?” he asked. John turned then and looked at him. One of those puzzled faces, as if Rodney had asked something in a foreign language. Then he shrugged.

“It’s all right,” John said. “I like open places. Yeah.”

“So,” Rodney said. “What are you going to do now? Go back to Alaska?” John didn’t answer right away. Instead he tipped his head back, looking up at the sky. Even with the moon out and bright you could still see a lot of. Rodney automatically determined the relative position of Pegasus, although he couldn’t see even the Great Square stars through the moon’s glare. It had almost set by now anyway. He wondered if that’s what John was looking for – if so, he was way off – but didn’t ask. Not with his other question still hanging in the air and had John even heard him? Maybe… no, probably, it was awkward. Probably you shouldn’t ask someone which of their third or fourth or twentieth best life choices they were going to scavenge for now that number one was off the table.

“Might,” John said, finally. “Might not. Heard they always need good pilots down in Brazil.”

“What, you’re going to run drugs now?” John just gave him a look. Yeah, okay, probably not.

The thing was, Rodney could see John down there in the jungle. The ex-pat American with the tragic past.. He’d even look great in an Indiana Jones hat. Whereas Rodney… Rodney might be leading the next expedition to Pegasus. John would probably never even know about it. Rodney wrapped his arms tighter around himself. His teeth were chattering with cold.

“You ready to head back?” John said. Rodney looked up.

“Was this,” Rodney started. “I mean was this what you wanted to show me?”

“Show you?” John said, sounding baffled, then his face cleared as realization struck. He looked down and smiled, almost shyly. “I didn’t want to show you anything, Rodney,” he said. “I just thought you might enjoy the ride.”

That night they ate a lazy dinner of fast food fried chicken and coleslaw, washed down with beer.in front of the TV. Neither of them said much, watching a little hockey, a little football, a cooking show, some nature thing, a cop show -- except during a commercial break, when Rodney had almost drifted off, John hit the mute and said:

“You know I…” and Rodney shook his head and said: “Yeah. No, that’s…” and then the show came on and he looked at John and John nodded back at him and turned the sound back on.

John had mostly packed up his stuff. The garage was probably tidier than before he came to stay. They hadn’t talked about a schedule, but he didn’t imagine John was going to hang around after he got the all clear from Jennifer. He could be gone tomorrow for all Rodney knew.

Probably that would be better. Neither of them seemed particularly good at goodbyes. John yawned hugely and rubbed at the small of his back again.

“Gonna call it a night,” he said. He looked tired. Rodney was tired too.

“Yeah,” he said and sat up.

“Yeah,” John repeated and bumped him lightly on the shoulder with a loose fist before he got up and headed off to his bed.

Rodney wasn’t sure what had woken him, but it was still dark out. He lay there listening, but the house was quiet so probably it was just the beer. Reluctantly he got out of the nice warm bed, toes shriveling from contact with the icy floor, and headed for the bathroom in the dark. Except the door to the bathroom was closed and light outlined the rectangular shape of the door and dammit, how was Sheppard’s timing so incredibly perfect?

He tsked, grimaced as his bladder asserted that it really _was_ full and kept going down the hall to the kitchen. His foot slid in something wet on the kitchen floor at just about the same moment his hand hit the light.

Adrenaline slammed through him. There was a blood trail across the kitchen floor from the garage door and back the way he’d come. For a second he was utterly frozen, unable to even catch his breath. The blood was bright scarlet and wet. Fat, round sunburst splashes and long smears. It looked like an awful lot and Rodney actually couldn’t remember whether it always looked like there was more or less blood than was actually lost, even as he turned back to the hall and stuttered out:

“J-John?” in a breathless little croak

The bathroom door wasn’t locked and John was a pale crumple in the space between toilet and tub, skin the same colour as the tiles and not moving in the bright halogen glare. The only colour in the room was the brilliant fans and splashes of blood, a shiny cascade of it down across John’s lips and chin and t-shirt.

Rodney was too cold to feel sick. He wasn’t even sure what he was doing, only the next thing he knew he was kneeling over John, shaking him, and getting blood all over his cellphone and Jennifer was saying in a tiny voice in his ear:

“Rodney, did you hear me? Call 911.” He still couldn’t make his voice work properly but he was certain of this one thing.

“No,” he said. “Please. Just you. Just _come_.”

It turned out to be less blood than Rodney had thought.

“Maybe two pints,” Jennifer said, impatiently, adjusting the blood pressure cuff on John’s upper arm. She was crouched over John in the narrow space, trying to monitor his vitals.

She hadn’t wanted to move him yet – just enough to get some pillows under him and blankets over him. John had come back to some kind of semi-consciousness while Rodney had waited for her to arrive, but he was in and out, not making a lot of sense.

“That’s not too bad, right?” Rodney asked, anxiously watching over her shoulder. “You can lose two pints.”

“Well,” she said. “It’s not good. He needs to be in a hospital.”

“But it’s stopped,” Rodney said. “It was a nosebleed. I get them all the time. It’s the dry air – you know there’s less than 3% humidity in the desert air this time of year. I keep meaning to get a humidifier, because let me tell you—“

“Rodney,” she snapped. “It’s not a nosebleed.” Rodney went silent, felt his cheeks heat.

“I know,” he said. “I just…”

“I know you promised him you wouldn’t call in the SGC, but Rodney…” She glanced at John. His eyes were moving erratically under his closed eyelids. His lips moved a little like he was muttering, but no sounds were coming out.

“Look,” she said, more gently than he ever remembered her being and he wanted to put his hands over his ears. He recognized that gentle tone. Elizabeth had used it all the time. He listened anyway.

“I was afraid something like this would happen,” Keller said. “It’s not the retrovirus per se, it’s the serum that’s causing his system to break down. The retrovirus had co-opted a number of John’s systems – integumentary, hormonal, neurological. Circulatory. The old iratus stem cells – they don’t… they’re just too defective. I had hoped there were enough human cells left to pick up the slack but…”

“What does that mean?” Rodney said. “What do we do now?”

She looked at him, pointedly.

“No, no, no…” he said. “We don’t give up.”

“Of course not,” she said. “But remember I said there might come a point where we wouldn’t have a choice about calling in expert help. We’re there.”

“No,” Rodney said. “Make another batch. They can’t all be bad cells.”

“I’ve been making batches continuously since I started, Rodney. What I gave John was the best of them. Every batch before and since has shown nothing but more and more advanced degradation.”

Rodney stared at her. The blood pressure cuff beeped.

Jennifer turned her attention back to John. Even Rodney could see that fresh blood was welling from his nose and mouth and when Jennifer pulled his shirt up, John’s stomach looked hard and swollen.

Keller injected something into John’s arm and listened with her stethoscope.

“Dammit,” she said. With her free hand, she pulled a phone out of her breast pocket and flipped it open. It occurred to Rodney that he could knock the phone out of her hand, stop her from calling anyone, even push her away and crouch over John’s body like some wounded grizzly bear. He didn’t do it. He just sat there while she spoke into the phone, giving details in that clipped doctor jargon that Rodney often wished he didn’t understand as well as he did, and watched John dying on his bathroom floor.

Whoever she’d called, they took it seriously. He heard the siren, literally within minutes. They looked like ordinary paramedics, but they didn’t ask nearly enough questions, and Rodney recognized SGC personnel when he saw them.

“I’m riding in the ambulance,” he said, and when they turned to Jennifer for verification, he shoved his ID card in their faces and said: “I have higher clearance than God. Don’t try to stop me.”

Nobody did.

The ambulance ride was short and hellish. Rodney took a position that seemed to be in everybody’s way, but he had a hold of one of John’s hands and he wouldn’t (couldn’t) let go. John, oxygen-masked and intravenous-ed, rolled in and out of consciousness.

“It's going to be okay,” Rodney said, one time when it looked like John was actually coming around. “You know you can trust me.”

But John knew SGC personnel when he saw them too, and he gave Rodney a look of such infinite hurt and betrayal it was like the last week of reconciliation had never happened. Then he shut his eyes and turned his face away and if he regained consciousness after that, Rodney didn’t know it.

The main infirmary at Area 51 was large, bright and, tonight, mostly empty. All of Rodney’s clearance couldn’t get him past the waiting area and into the emergent care room. Or maybe it could have, but Jennifer said:

“Let us work, Rodney,” and squeezed his arm once before she disappeared behind the double, swinging doors. Rodney stood there staring as the doors flapped to stillness. He could probably push his way in on sheer bluster -- he’d done it before, on different worlds, under different stars – but it wouldn’t get him anything but banished most likely. There wasn’t anything more for him to do here now but wait, and he hated waiting.

Besides, he had work to do.

The first thing he did when he got to the lab, was strip off his clammy, blood-stained shirt, shuddering as he scoured John’s blood off his hands and chest with wads of damp paper towel. He threw the whole mess in the trash and covered it with more paper towel. Then he prowled through the locker room until he found an unlocked locker with a spare shirt in it. It didn’t fit and wasn’t clean, but it was better than nothing.

After that, he booted up his computer and hacked into the medical mainframe using the false ID he’d created for the purpose. It was the work of minutes to set up a system that would message his cell-phone if any orders were given to move the patient brought into the infirmary under the care of Dr. J. Keller.

It took a little longer to find the other information he wanted and by the time he was done, Radek and some of the other staff were meandering in, bright and early. They had – Rodney checked his watch – exactly 9 hours and 14 minutes before the puddlejumper’s first official field test in front of God and Generals and everything. Rodney took a deep breath. The thought of what he was going to do made him feel more than a little ill.

Just like the good old days, he thought bitterly and then put on his best ‘everything is just fine’ face and went out to join Radek on the floor.

He spent the next seven hours utterly engrossed in his work on the puddlejumper – testing every crystal, cross-checking every system, assessing every seam; tightening every bolt, running every possible last minute simulation and pausing to panic only every fifteen or twenty minutes or so and frantically check his cell phone for alerts. There were none. He still felt like he was about to have a heart attack.

It had been years since he’d worked this kind of insane pace and he was, he had to admit is as his heart thumped terrifyingly in his chest and cold sweat broke out on every exposed inch of skin, an old man now. Forty five. Middle aged. And he hadn’t managed to pass on his genes and…

“You okay?” Radek asked him, coming to sit beside Rodney on the low edge of the workbench. “You look a little…” He made an unhappy face.

“Nerves,” Rodney said.

“Yeah,” Radek laughed. “Me too. Can you believe it? All these years and suddenly I have performance anxiety. You’d think this was my wedding night.”

Rodney looked at him, slightly horrified.

“Okay, remember that talk we had about things that were too much information?” Radek laughed again and bumped Rodney with his shoulder.

“It’s been good, this,” he said. “Getting this working. It’s been good for you most of all, I think. Got you out of your slump finally.” No, Rodney thought. That was John. A wave of guilt washed over him.

“Listen, Radek,” he said, impulsively. “You…” He stopped, closed his eyes for a second. Took a calming breath and looked up again to find Radek, watching him, face full of concern. Kindness. Yeah, that didn’t help. “You’ve been a decent friend,” he said finally. “You probably won’t believe this but, I, uh, I always noticed. That.”

“I think you told me this once already,” Radek said. “You’re not dying again, are you?”

“What? No,” Rodney said, scowling.

“Good,” Radek said. “Because somebody has to make the presentation to the Generals and it’s not going to be me.”

“Oh, Christ,” Rodney said. “The presentation!”

“Do not, under any circumstances, tell me you forgot to prepare it.”

“No, no,” Rodney lied. “I just…” He checked his watch. There was just over an hour before they’d be taking the jumper out to the testing area. “I, uh, better go, uh, polish it…” He pointed vaguely at the door.

“You better,” Radek yelled after him, only half joking, Rodney suspected. “Or, you better not come back.”

It took him nearly twenty minutes to get back across the huge Area 51 complex to the medical unit, and another ten to find Keller’s personal office. It was, thank God, dark and locked and took him only a moment or two of fiddling with the electronic lock to get into.

Once he was inside, he had to stop for a minute in the dark to wipe more cold sweat off his forehead and still his shaking knees. Really, _seriously_ not cut out for this shit anymore. And there was no time to waste. He turned on the light and took quick stock of the office. The surfaces were tidy except for a few loose files, a stolen cafeteria tea-pot, an inbox full of mail. There were some books on the shelves, a few photographs of people who looked plump and pleasant and parental; a laptop, a few knick knacks…

He opened the drawers of her desk – more files, more paper – the file cabinets under the bookshelves – accordion files, black ring binders. There was a matching freestanding cabinet beside the desk. He had to pick the lock to open it and inside he found her safe. Dammit. He didn’t have _time_\--

The door opened. Jennifer Keller stepped inside. They stared at one another, completely speechless. Then Jennifer closed the door behind her.

“Jennifer, I—“ She held up her hand for him to stop speaking and he did. Then she walked over and sat down at her desk. She looked, he realized, exhausted. Dark circles under her eyes.

“John,” he said.

“Stable for the moment,” she said. “Although it took some doing. Fortunately they’re allowing me to continue working on his case, at least up until my disciplinary hearing.”

“I’m so sorry,” Rodney said. He was still on his knees in front of the safe. He couldn’t bring himself to move.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “This was my choice.”

“Still…”

“Please,” she said, sounding angry for the first time. She cupped her face with both hands, scrubbed at her cheekbones with her fingers. “We needed to call the experts in. In fact, I’ve just come from a meeting with the top four xenopathologists in North America. They’ve spent the last few hours reading my notes, examining John’s test results. It was their intervention that got the hemorrhaging stopped.”

“Good,” Rodney said, his voice, just a whisper.

“They said there’s nothing they can do,” Jennifer said.

“Oh,” said Rodney. It didn’t seem to impact him. Like the non-feeling of steaming coffee running down the front of the personal shield. He wondered what made him think of _that_ after all these years. “How long did they think…?”

Jennifer shook her head.

“A week?” she said. “Maybe two. Not more than that. Not without fresh iratus stem cells to make serum from.” Rodney nodded.

“John’s in room 23C,” Jennifer went on, as if it were part of the conversation. “The combination for the safe is 28713954111. You need to take everything in there, including my notes. Do you remember the gate address of the planet where the nest was found?”

“I…” Rodney’s throat closed up. “Yes. Of course I do. But… can you say that number again?” She leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes and smiled a very small, tired smile. Then she repeated the number slowly enough for Rodney to key it in.

The Ancient synthesizer was about the size, shape, and weight of a flat–topped bowling ball. It came in a carrier case and there was a tray of tubes and pipettes with it as well as a small, silver Notebook. Rodney took it all.

On the way out, he stopped anyway, even though there was no time, put everything down on the desk and hugged her. He didn’t have the voice to say ‘thank you’ but he mouthed it into her hair and she hugged him back tightly before she let him go.

He stole a white coat and a wheelchair and waved at the marines on duty at the infirmary door. They asked for his ID anyway, but he really did have the top clearance any scientist in the SGC could have, plus a wheelchair full of Ancient medical equipment and so they let him in.

Room 23C was fortuitously located near a service elevator.

John was awake, lying in the narrow bed in clean scrubs. He had an IV in his hand and a little canula under his nose and he was staring at the ceiling when Rodney walked in. He glanced at Rodney, took in the chair, the equipment and the doctor coat, and then went right back to staring upward.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” Rodney said. “I know I promised you I wouldn’t call in the SGC but you were _dying_ and I couldn’t… Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m not letting you… I’m taking you with me.”

John kept staring at the ceiling.

“Yeah, I think I’ll take my chances here where I _know_ they don’t have my best interests at heart.’

“Okay, this is stupid,” Rodney said.

“What is?”

“Us fighting. I know you’re not happy with me -- and you may have some cause -- but anyway, it’s not going to matter much if we don’t get you out of here.” John still hadn’t taken his eyes from the ceiling. Rodney wished for the strength to just pick him up by the scruff of his stubborn, hairy neck. “Look, we have to work together, so ... so, so, I’m sorry.”

John’s head turned. His eyes met Rodney’s.

“Apology accepted,” he said.

“Right,” Rodney said. “Okay, we have about…” he checked his watch. “Oh God, really not enough time for pleasant chit chat. Get in the chair.”

It took them far too much time, in Rodney’s opinion, to get John unhooked and unstuck and into the chair with the synthesizer in his lap and a blanket over his legs.

“Where are we going?” John asked as Rodney pushed him down the hall.

“Oh, you know,” Rodney said, panting and sweating. “Halfway across the planet because for some reason medical and astrophysics can’t be in the same damn wing of the complex.”

“I think that’s because you guys always blow stuff up,” John said. “And where are we going, again?” Rodney just grinned, a pained, sweaty grin.

“You like surprises, right?”

“Depends,” John said, cautiously, “on the nature of the surprise.”

“Oh, you’ll like this one,” Rodney said. “You know, if I don’t have a coronary before we get there.”

He did managed to survive the long trip back to the lab. John had dozed off about halfway there, only starting awake as Rodney stopped to unlock his office door.

“What’s this?” John asked, fuzzily.

“Just a temporary rest stop,” Rodney said. “I have to leave you here while I take care of some things. Do not, under any circumstances, leave this room. Hello? Are you listening?”

But John was clearly not listening. His gaze was caught by the view over Rodney’s shoulder – the view from the office window onto the lab floor down below. Rodney watched the play of feelings over John’s face, the way he swallowed convulsively a couple of times before he was able to speak.

“You, uh… you have the keys to that?” John asked, voice gone tight, his whole body nearly quivering with the obvious wish to get closer.

“Yes,” Rodney said, pretending impatience as he gathered up the few tools he thought he’d need and his laptop and piled them into John’s lap. “We are going for a ride in the puddlejumper. If you stay here and don’t get caught while I’m setting things up.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” John said, softly.

Rodney looked at his watch as he ran down the stairs. Minutes. God, they were down to minutes. He stopped a white-coat whose name he couldn’t even begin to remember and asked where Zelenka was.

“At the test site, Doctor,” she said. “We’re heading over there now.”

“Good, good,” Rodney said. “Now I know it sounds a little unorthodox, but there is an old Atlantis tradition that the, uh, chief engineer, which is me, obviously, uh, needs to have a moment alone with the, um, vehicle on its maiden… voyage.” The technician stared at him blankly. “So you all have to clear out. Completely. For…” he looked at his watch again. “Seven minutes.”

“I’ll have to check with Dr. Zee,” the technician said and tapped her radio before Rodney could backtrack, informing Dr. Zelenka of the non-existent ritual while Rodney tried to think of some way he could pass this off as a bad joke, or nerves or…

“Dr. Zelenka? Are you still there?” the girl was saying. And then. “Of course. Right away, Dr. Zelenka.” She smiled at Rodney. “There’s only a handful of people left,” she told him. “It’ll just take us a minute to clear out of your way.”

“Oh, well, good,” Rodney said.

“He said to tell you he hopes you know what you’re doing.”

“Oh,” Rodney said. “And by that he means the, uh, ritual thing, which of course, I do.” But the tech was already moving to clear out her fellow technicians and okay, so Radek was possibly smarter than even Rodney gave him credit for. And God, he -- _they_ \-- owed him for this.

Rodney could take some comfort from the fact that now, at least, Radek would be a shoe in for the Nobel.

It actually took him less than seven minutes to get John down the service elevator to the jumper, even though John made him stop for a few precious seconds just so he could lay his hand on the outside of the jumper’s shell. He took the remaining time to do a quick systems check and pack the precious synthesizer into one of the rear storage containers.

He helped John out of the wheelchair and there was an awkward moment when John leaned toward the pilot’s chair and Rodney had to shake his head, gesture toward the co-pilot seat on the other side. John gave a rueful shrug, but he was leaning almost all his weight on Rodney just to stay upright and there didn’t seem to be too much argument left in him.

Rodney took the pilot’s chair himself and brought up the HUD.

“Aren’t you going to ask where we’re going now?” he said, looking over at John. John was sitting back in his chair, eyes closed, a small half-smile on his lips.

“Nah,” he said. “I’m good.” Rodney bit his lip. This mission wasn’t exactly a guaranteed success. Chances were they wouldn’t even make it out of the hangar before the SGC blew them out of the sky.

Or maybe they they’d make it all the way.

“Well, I’m not so much about the journey,” Rodney said. “I’m pretty much a destination oriented kind of guy, so I actually have a place in mind.”

“Yeah?” said John, looking over at him, green eyes bright, lips curved in a familiar sardonic smile. “Where’s that?”

Rodney lay his hand on the start plate and powered up the jumper. He looked at John and then out the front viewscreen at the slowly opening hangar door.

“How about home?”

(end)

**Author's Note:**

> Notes:  
1\. Thanks to Sarah T. for having the idea and cruelly forcing me to write it. Also for brainstorming, hand-holding and serious comma-wrangling. Thanks also to Kormantic for comments and hugs and to Sageness for fast, detailed and very insightful beta. All remaining mistakes are my own.  
2\. Standard fanfic disclaimers apply.  
3\. Some dialogue appropriated from Stargate Atlantis episode 4x01: Adrift by Martin Gero  
4\. John’s bike is a Harley Davidson 2008 VRSCD Night Rod in vivid black. See it [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harley-Davidson_VRSC#/media/File:Harley_5-06.jpg)


End file.
